One, two, three, four, can I have a little more?

Numbers! Numerals! Ah, whatever you want to call them.

Mychai is a base-ten number system much like English. I won’t go to much into that, because it confuses me more than anything.

More on Mychai numbers can be found in the grammar, here I’ll expand a bit on the usage of them, specifically on whether they refer to people or non-people.

The numbers listed below are used for counting, items, abstractions, animals etc:
yl – [ɪl] – one
dhuim – [ðʷim] – two; couple; pair
athma – [‘a.θma:] – three
ëren – [‘ø.ʁen] – four
emeth – [‘e.meθ] – five

Mychai has a second set of numbers that are used when referring to people:
ilh – [iɬ] – one
dim – [dim] – two; couple; pair
thém – [θeɪm] – three
rien – [‘ʁi.en] – four
math – [maθ] – five

Now a few examples of them in use.

Oido de athma Mugov.
oido              de                 athma                         Mug-ov
[oi.do:          de:                a.θma:                         mu.gof]
have.PRS     1s.NOM       three.nonhuman        stone-ACC
I have three stones.

Hal thém Ksro delh.
hal             thém                   Ksro                de-lh
EXIST       three.human      son.NOM       1s-LOC
I have three sons. (lit. There are three sons at me.)

Of course, the second example shows another difference in that possession of human-human relationships (and a few other English possessive expressions) are expressed through existential locatives. More on that later, though.

In addition, it’s important to note that composed forms are based always on the nonhuman numbers, regardless of whether they modify humans or nonhumans.

And, the ordinal number first (ghel) does not differ between human and nonhuman referents.  (Ordinals are otherwise identical in form to the cardinal numbers…more on this later too!)