02 Foreign languages

This section thus begins with a topic which would also have fitted perfectly into the section on “Language and Writing”.

Numbers can be nicely hidden by representing them in foreign languages. One, two, three we will all get freely translated, but what about aon, M?t trà or hai, ba?

Unfortunately, there are symbol tables and search engines to help us out of such difficulties. It gets meaner when the owner has gone to the trouble of developing his own counting language.
If this consists of only the first 10 digits, you often still have some chance of getting further in the exclusion process using logic and the approximate coordinate range alone.

Keep in mind that a mystery question mark may only be 2-3 km from its hiding place (or the starting point of the cache). The searched coordinate can thus be circumscribed a little.

In addition to the digits, 10s, 100s or 1,000s numeral words in foreign languages can of course also be used. These are often not so easy to find via Wikipedia and co and, in the worst case, require some powers of deduction. First of all to find out which language you are in and then how it is counted there. Often it’s like in German, where the structure of the number words is logically similar (at least behind twelve, by the way, a remnant from the time when the decimal system was not the only way of counting and people liked to use counting systems up to 12, up to the dozen. ). Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. Even a foreigner who does not speak German will recognise the similarities here and possibly be able to conclude that fifty-two in Latin numbers is 52. The 3, for example, whether written dree, drie, tre, tri, thrie, tres or trais, is easy to identify in almost all the examples of number words listed at Wikipedia .