Speculation:Seventeen

From the Lyorn Records of the Dragaeran Empire

Given the nature of the Dragarean measurements of time and money, it would make sense to assume that Dragaerans use base-seventeen mathematics.

Obviously, SKZB (or possibly Paarfi of Roundwood) has translated the values in the books to be ones that the reader will understand.

This would make it much easier to express common values (such as 289, or 83,521) since they could be written as 10, or 1,000. Basically, their multiples of seventeen would be just as easy for them as multiples of ten are for us.

This begs the obvious question, what single digits would they use for the values ten through sixteen?

All of this assumes, of course, that Dragaerans use a arabic-style digital numbering system--which is far from certain.

It's hinted that the Dragearan written language is ideographic, so the numbers probably use ideographic symbols we've never seen before. They could be combined "digitaly" like arabic numerals or using connectors in the powers of the radix as the numbers in the Chinese ideography, or spoken English are.

Example: 4913 = 四千九百一十三 = 四(4)千(1000)九(9)百(100)一(1)十(10)三(3) The 一 would be dropped before the 十 if there weren't more before it.

If we wanted to do math with radix 17 IRL, the easiest way would be to do it the same way as we usualy do radix 16 and use latin letters, in this case, A (10) through G (16).

As far as we know, Dragearans still have 10 fingers and maybe they developed their number system before realizing the importance of 17 or stole it from the Easterners, they could just get realy good at remembering powers of 17 and related numbers in radix 10 the same way people who spend too much time with computers can remember that 2^(2^3*3) is 16,777,216.