Counting in Zemeni

Language overview

Zemeni is the language of the nation of Novyi Zem bordered by the Wandering Isle to the north, the True Sea to the east, and the Southern Colonies to the south in the Grishaverse world of Leigh Bardugo’s books Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows. The Zemeni language appears in the second season of the Netflix series Shadow and Bone released on March, 16 2023. Its written form has been designed by David J. Peterson. The Netflix series features also three other languages created by David J. Peterson: Ravkan, Fjerdan (with Christian Thalmann), and Kerch.

Zemeni numerals

The Zemeni written form is an abugida, or an alphasyllabary in which consonants and vowels are written in the same units, and not separately. Zemeni numbers follow the decimal positional system exactly like in English. Hence, to write the number eleven [11], you write two times the glyph for [1]: one for the ten, and one for the unit.

Zemeni numbering rules

Now that you’ve had a gist of the most useful numbers, let’s move to the writing rules for the tens, the compound numbers, and why not the hundreds, the thousands and beyond (if possible).

• I don’t know much of the Zemeni numbers apart from its numeral, so stay tuned, I will add content to this page as soon as I get more data.

Books

Articles

Shadow and Bone languages

Kerch, Ravkan, Shu, and Zemeni.

Other supported languages

As the other currently supported languages are too numerous to list extensively here, please select a language from the full list of supported languages.