Welterfindung

It's German for world-building. It's really more about cultural setting, but I dare you to slide a credit card between those two words. Also, the German word for "culture" makes me nervous; the Nazis adequately summed up a wise course for all Germany's neighbors when they said "Whenever I hear the word 'Kultur' I reach for my gun."

• So my felinoids have 23 teeth, each double-pointed (I didn't mention how many they had, when last I mentioned this). They also have 18 digits, 5 fingers per hand and 4 toes per foot. They usually go barefoot; most of them use base-10, but two of their societies use base-18 numbers traditionally (they switched to using base-10 later on, since the decimal society created science, but there're probably remnants of the old system, just like there are lots of remnants of duodecimal numbers in several European languages).
  
  Their modern numeral system is currently acrophonic—it uses the first letter of each number's name in the decimal society's language—and a decimal, place-value notation, but they used to use something akin to the Greek numerals, with the first 9 letters being the numbers 1-9, the next 9 being 10-90 (by tens), and the next 9 being 100-900. I'm not sure about the four letters they'd have left over (they've got 31); they use 100, rather than 1000, as a super-base (as Indian languages tend to do), so maybe the leftovers were 10,000 ("myriad"), million, hundred million, and 10 billion. I'm guessing those work more like kanji numbers, so you'd write "5 (10 billion)" for 50 billion.
  
  The base-18 civilization used the first to seventeenth letters for, well, 1-17, and the eighteenth for 18 (which would be "10" in an octodecimal system, though they never combined place value with those numbers); the 19th is 324 (18²), 20th is 5832 (18³), and 21st is 104,976 (18⁴); the last 10 letters are fractions. Yeah, the base-18 guys use the same alphabet, just like Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan fundamentally use the same one (though this one has changed less).


• The evangelical-Heideggerians use base-12, since they've got six fingers per hand; I have a scene where one of them is talking to two of the felinoids (in English, since they don't speak each other's language), and he says, at one point, "Six gross, eleven dozen, four years". Your species calls it a millennium (1000 in duodecimal is 6b4₁₂). Remember how the bad guys are the Phoenix Society? Yeah, he's explaining what a phoenix is.
  
  The gift-culture fuzzy Dromaeosaurs use base-8, having 4 fingers per hand, and, unfortunately, there are no convenient words for octal numbers in English. But one of the felinoids (a computer technician, and I'm not entirely sure their computers don't use octal instead of hex), does the conversions in his head, like "eight squared, 4 eights, 4" (a hundred, in base-8 144₈).


• I like fictional calendars, I really do. I once made a spreadsheet—in AppleWorks, this should tell you how long ago—to convert Athas' 375 day calendar and Faerûn's 365 day one. Yeah.
  
  Anyway, in my SF book, the UN simply gives the years as 4-digit numbers, then months as 2-digit, then day as 2-digit, i.e. 2342-10-17 is the day when some of the characters space-fold into the Solar System. That, of course, is ISO 8601, the standard for date formats. What's interesting is BC dates are given as -(# BC -1), e.g. Julius Caesar was assassinated in -0043.
  
  That, naturally, is how things work on earth. In the colonies, all the official dates are in Julian Days (corrected for relativity, of course, if a clock had to be moved between planets); of course, so as not to have to put things like "2576746.5" all over (that's the above date), they use good ol' Modified Julian Days, which makes that date "176746". Naturally, most colonials use the ISO 8601 dates in conversation.
  
  The UN, in keeping with ISO 8601, also uses Universal Time, at least on Earth and space-stations. Planetary colonies combine a local calendar and clock with Zulu Time, as one would be likely to do on a Martian colony. What's fun is I have them just calling 8:00 "eight", etc., like we do with normal time, but the pm numbers are "thirteen", etc.
  
  The felinoids have similar systems, of course, but adjusted for their own planet's year and day, and their clock's units.


• I am of two minds on the question of liturgical calendars in space colonies. On the one hand, the liturgical seasons being tied to the real changes in the natural world helps to tie one's religion to one's daily life, but on the other hand, the fact they're called "seasons" doesn't seem to have effected church life in Brazil or Rwanda any (they're on the equator, see, they have no seasons).
  
  Maybe offworld churches do something a bit like some aspects of the Jewish diaspora's observance. Did you know, for instance, that most dreydls are marked with the Hebrew for "NGHŠ", for "a great miracle happened there", but in Israel, they replace the "Š" with a "P", for "a great miracle happened here"?


• So it's peculiar how much cultures can differ on what is "food" and what is "a pet", and it's also peculiar how seldom SF writers have noticed the difference. Oh, except to either normalize cannibalism (because it's just a quaint local taboo), or else to try and equate eating non-sapients with cannibalism (because of course, the first thing a Kzin would notice about you is your flat molars, and not the fact you can talk).
  
  But seriously, much of Asia and Africa and many Native Americans think of dogs as food, or did till recently (till Westernization in East Asia and the Americas, and Islam in Africa and other parts of Asia), and apparently Masai people find eating fish disturbing—though it seems to be because to them, fish are creepy-crawlies, another category that's highly variable. Navajos, many Latin Americans, and Mizrahi Jews consider grasshoppers food, and there are actually places in South America, supposedly, that serve fried grasshoppers in movie theaters. Mexicans also used to eat dogs (chihuahuas aren't a pet, folks), and not as a part of the Aztecs' deliberate terror-campaign (which is what their cannibalism was, it's actually strongly tabooed by all the Uto-Aztecans).
  
  My felinoids have a taboo on domesticating herbivores (they went right from hunters to farmers, and never were herders), but also on eating carnivores other than invertebrates and sea-creatures—and use "eater of people" as a severe swear word. They domesticate several other carnivores (a thing like a horse-sized dog and another like an elephant-sized bear, as well as a cat-monkey they're somewhat related to).
  
  Incidentally, their agriculture, despite lacking herds, was responsible for their rise of civilization—yet their diet is still over 70% meat (hypercarnivorous). See, storing agricultural products attracted creatures analogous to rats and crows...which they eat.


• Speaking of my guys using "man-eater" as a cussword, why are people so inept at coming up with alien cussing? Is it just how few of them know how to cuss in non-Indo-European languages?
  
  My felinoids use mention, and accusations, of taboo-breaking, for cussing. That is, they'll say, e.g., "You eat children" for "Screw you." They also like to stack them, as in, "go scavenge at the graves of the kin you poisoned"—scavenging, desecrating graves, cannibalism, kin-slaying, and poisoning all being taboos. It's so much more artistic than a mere cluster F-bomb.
  
  The other way they swear, is by saying "damn", only they say "drown (whatever) in hell" (they don't use "damned" as an adjective much, though). See, their artistic depiction of hell (not their doctrine, just like the fire and brimstone aren't literal) is an infinite, flooded abyss that you sink in, forever, drowning but unable to die. Aside from being a fairly decent expression of the state of perdition (if I do say so myself, though it's not like it isn't just thawed Dante), it also incorporates their old religion's horror of drowning.
  
  Anyway, though, Wikipedia's got pages on cussing in Chinese and several other languages, and you can probably find pages on how to cuss in any language with more than a million speakers, somewhere on the web. Why not use the Internet's filthy-sewerness constructively, to get ideas for writing?