Counting in the Storybook Savannah
most would say that the animals in the Storybook Savannah only speak one language. the humans who dreamt of it long ago wished for a world with no miscommunication, no varying contexts or culture-specific etiquette rules-- and by the time they realized how nonsensical this all was, or appreciated the beauty of languages other than their own, the animals were the way they were.
but in the Storybook Savannah something material can spring fontacious from an very small, mundane idea-- and some humans have a very frivolous idea that they only count in base-ten because they have ten fingers on each hand!
(never mind all the humans who teach one another to count by twelve or six or sixty or something else entirely, or all the humans who weren't born with ten fingers and count by tens just fine, or the ones that get along fine without counting... an idea can be stuffy and brittle occasionally. the danger of idealism is the danger of beautiful snowfall. it blankets soft grass the same as the toys on which you might stub your toe.)
yet from this nonsense, a variegated beauty arises. the ungulates count in binary, representing numbers in clops like dashes and dots. the birds count in groups of three, taking to the sky in fifty-fours and eighty-ones; the millipedes, with a different sigil for every number smaller than a thousand, shelter in libraries, often needing a reminder of which penstrokes are needed to write "234" in a single digit.
and that's not even to look deeper than species-- the breeds of dog that count from their hind legs first; schizodactyl monkeys who cling without their thumbs, and so count starting from their index fingers; the animals that are born with more or fewer fingers than their ancestors and learn from them with barely a hiccup.
and across all species, mathematicians act as translators and educators, excited to explain how an octopus' brushstroke can be broken into three of the horses' brisk clops, or how the cicadas' numbers eschew place value entirely, because their interests lie in the mysterious "primes". it makes me smile that even in this world and its coarse fabric, they learned to talk and play with one another.