Examples of SDN

SDN is such a powerful system that it's sometimes difficult to see how it could be applicable. Particularly for those who jumped directly into the Full SDN Explanation, it may be tough to see how such a powerful set of rules would normally be used. However, despite its being more powerful than our current ways of speaking about numbers, SDN is also easier to use, because it is both simpler and more regular. Some examples of that simplicity follow.

Time

Almost any period of time would serve as a useful example of SDN's power; using the suffix "-hour" or "-day" or "-month" would be just as valid as what we've used here. However, due to the correspondence of the suffixes "-ennial" with a few common English words, we've selected it to serve as a paradigm.

Notable in the above table is that SDN does not disturb current words where they fit into the system. In fact, many current words do fit into SDN, particularly those below ten, and there is no reason to change these.

However, also notable is that SDN easily handles all these expressions according to regular, easily understood rules. Wherever a number convenient to decimal is chosen, such as one hundred, five hundred, or seven hundred and fifty, SDN is perfectly able to handle it without so much as a hiccup. On the other hand, when a number convenient to dozenal is presented to the current "system," there is often either no word for it (20, 30, 40, 100, and so on), or only a rather clumsy word, which cannot be predicted according to rule ("duodecennial"). Furthermore, unless someone knows Latin, most of the old forms of these words will be hard to derive unless one already knows them; SDN requires knowledge only of SDN.

Notably also, even some decimally-convenient number can't shoehorn themselves into a sensible English expression! The primary example in this table is seven hundred and fifty.

Shapes

Shapes are an area where SDN's improvements will be even more evident. The table below, limiting itself to polygons (ignoring the third dimension), makes that amply clear.

This old names in this table are certainly puzzling. Some of the shapes are named for the number of angles, some for the number of sides; there is a prefix "nona" for nine which is sometimes seen elsewhere, but sometimes disappears in favor of "enn"; the whole system is decimally-based, of course; and then comes this strange "icosa" prefix, which apparently means "twenty," but which is rarely if ever seen anywhere else. And "icosakaitera" as the name for the simple binaunquagon?

The current system of naming polygons is so bad, in fact, that even mathematicians, more familiar with such things than most of us, routinely refer to such shapes as, e.g., "24-gons" (pronounced "twenty-four-gons"), rather than using the words that supposedly cover this need! Clearly, something in this system has to give.

SDN can easily name any polygon according to regular rules without the introduction of unpredictable roots or strange constructions.