![]() ![]() It was torture for them.” By the 1990s the Iñupiaq oral counting system was dangerously close to being forgotten. “But when my father went to school, if he spoke the language, they would slap his hands. “We had a tutor from the village who would help us blend into the white man's world,” Pollock says of her own education. “Before yardsticks or rulers, used their hands and fingers to calculate or measure.”ĭuring the 19th and 20th centuries American schools suppressed the Iñupiaq language-first violently and then quietly. “When my mother made me a parka, she used her thumb and her middle finger to measure how many times she would be able to cut the material,” Pollock says. In traditional practices, the body also serves as a mathematical multitool. Iñuiññaq, the word for 20, represents a whole person. “In your one arm, you have tallimat fingers,” Pollock explains. For example, she says, tallimat-the Iñupiaq word for 5-comes from the word for arm: taliq. The system “is really the count of your hands and the count of your toes,” says Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock, who taught with the Kaktovik numerals in Utqiagvik, a city 300 miles northwest of where they were invented. Quantities are first described in groups of five, 10 and 15, and then in sets of 20. The Alaskan Inuit language, known as Iñupiaq, uses an oral counting system built around the human body. But other number systems exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”-values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. Today's numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers-creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. Similarly, if the option "Count Hyphenated Words" is on, then the word "one-third" is considered as two separate words, and if the option is off, then this text is a single word.In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere's first new numeral system in more than a century. If this option is disabled, then this text is a single word. For example, if the option "Count Contractions" is enabled, then the word "he'll" is counted as two separate words. The last two options determine how to count words with apostrophes and hyphens. By default, the words "Apple" and "apple" are considered the same but if you want these two words to be treated as two separate words, then you can enable the "Case Sensitive Counting" option. In this mode, the program will first find all unique words in the text and only then it will count them. If you are interested in finding the number of unique words in the text, you can switch to the "Count Unique Words" mode. If you want both words to be ignored at once, you can enable the "Case Sensitive Ignore" option. By default, this option is not case-sensitive, meaning the words "A" and "a" are ignored separately. If you don't want to include certain words in the count (such as articles), you can enter them into the words-to-ignore option. By default, the program counts absolutely all words in the text, including articles ("a", "an", "the"), prepositions ("in", "on", "at", …), conjunctions ("and", "but", "if", …), and even numbers ("7", "15", "3526", …). The result of counting the words is a single number that is printed in the output. ![]() With this online tool, you can find the number of words in the given text. ![]()
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