To be precise it’s using the rules we’ve been using to make names for number but backwards! Sound confusing? Don’t worry we’ll go step by step! First of all let’s dissect the word (^_^) ehehehehe…. Basically we have go which is 5; ro which is 6; a which is, surprisingly, 2; wa which is 0 and se which also 0! Now if add them up 5+6+2+0+0 we get 13! Now then :3 if we use our usual sheme this would mean goroawase would be himi, sound familiar? And so far that’s just what we did, it even kinda sounds japanese, but eho says it needs to sound japanese anyway xD If we instead play around with the voicing of hi and maybe even use a different synonym for mi, guess what we get! I’ll give ya an hint from hi to bi to pi, and from mi to san to sa…….did you get it? That’s right PIZZA! With this system we can legit call goroawase pizza :333

Let’s take a look at the phrase Finger binary for example, in engrish that would be fingā bainari. Now we can apply goroawase. let’s start by removing the “n” in fingā because it’s in the way! We then get figā bainari by consulting the goroawase table on wikipedia we can see we’re short a couple of syllables already. So we’ll improvise!
For example if we look at the chinese word for 6 we find “liu” sans tones. As japanese has no word like that we’ll just transliterate it! And it becomes “riu” taking the first part we now have ri with which we have one word complete “binary” becoming bainari or 8+1+7+6 which is 22 or nini
as for figā: we’ll change the voicing of fi to “hi” which is 1 because fu in japanese is transformed similarily as hi, we’ll shorten the gā to ga and change the voicing so we have ka, which isn’t very usefull yet…. The closest we have when looking at the goroawase table are ku and ko. So we’ll have to choose one. As there are words in languages like Javanese that are read with an “o” eventhough its written with an “a”, we’ll choose “ko” as such figā becomes 1+5 = 6. As such finger binary becomes Ronini!

I have summarized what we did in table for reference:

But I also mentioned a script! How would the script look like? well now that we created the name Ronini by transliterating into japanese, applying goroawase and adding the resulting numbers for each word, we can now decide how it would look like. As we’re talking about using finger binary as a language we could then choose to make the script consist of emoji of all the 32 different gestures possible in finger binary! If we decide to use 1 gesture for each word, then as Ronini consisted of two words we could say the peace sign and the gesture for 22. We could also decide to choose one gesture for Finger Binary all together by finding the value for Ronini which is 6+2+2 or 10. The resulting gesture is featured as this posts picture xD In short by using the method we discussed finger binary becomes ronini represented by the gesture for 10.

As it is important to standarize which syllable is related to which number perhaps I’ll make a post detailing on how we can map the entire japanese sound inventory to goroawase…

Up till now we’ve been using two ways of making up names for all the different gestures.
so as the picture of The Compliment of The Hinishiya Hero aside for name for hand on which it is, which is pretty consistent, we can either call that gesture Romaya or Hini Hero!

The names are either based on value of the gesture or on the fingers involved in the gesture. naturally the value name can be inferred from the finger name. We can further categorize the finger name into bent finger name and raised finger name but that’ll complicate it because then I’ll be based on either two hands or one hands etc etc which was kinda discussed in the compliment of the hinishiya hero…….kinda……
For purpose of this post we’ll keep it simple: Value Name vs Finger Name
As explained in The Origin of The Hinishiya Hero the names have a origin in a type of Japanese wordplay called goroawase which makes use of 3 counting systems.
So do these names work?

The finger names comes from the names we gave our thumb, index, middle, ring and little finger in Hiniya! namely: Hi, Ni, Shi, Ya and Hero which inspired the name “hinishiya hero”! Based on which fingers are raised or not raised in a gesture we then select rhose syllables out of that name! for example the hite of this post’s featured picture  has the hi and ni fingers raised so the finger name would be hini! the minite also has the same fingers raised so that’s also called hini. To differentiate we simply say on which hand it is. so this post feature has a hini on minite and a hini on hite! little late but te is the japanese word for hand

The value name is then derived from the finger name by adding the finger values. what’s finger values? way back in hiniya we gave each finger not only the names hinshiya hero but also english names and well numerical names. Don’t forget the hinishiya hero names are based on japanese counting systems and goroawase so hi=1, ni=2 shi=4, ya=8 and hero=16. This is why hiniya hero=27! Based on that we have names for the digits 1,2,4 and 8 namely hi, ni, shi and ya. 16 consists of 2 digits so we used goroawase and called it Hero. based on the digits 1 and 6 in japanese aka “hīrō”. Since we already have since we know 1 is the hi in hīrō then the ro is 6! We also used goroawase to name one hand “minite” back in the origin of the hinishiya hero we said that mini stands for 32. We can then infer from the finger names that the “ni” in mini stands for 2, hence the mi stands for 3! But now i must confess we are reasoning backwards! haha, this is actually how those names came to be aka we choose to call 1 hi and 6 ro hence 16= hīrō or hero.

Ohw just a sideline the little – above i and the o, that i occasionaly use above certain vowels when using the japanese names, actually mean that it’s read hiiroo aka the vowels are long instead of short, twice as long to be exact! under the rules of goroawase this exceptable as it is a way to make puns, so that dates and numbers more easily remembered. This doubling length is also used with “hissatsu” the “s” from “san” is double it’s usual length! ohw and the “syllables” are technically moræ because they can be shorter than your usual syllable. they also almost always end in a vowel only one exception for example “san” has two moræ “sa” and “n” and all of then are equally “long”. there’s also “voicing” which allows for transformations such as from go to ko……
So the rules of goroawase that is used extensively in these names are: mora length can consonant voicing may be changed and only the first mora is used.
Other then that the different moræ are just sticked together to get the new name!

……that was long sideline…..let’s use a part of it to get back on track! As mentioned in the sideline consonant “voicing” may be changed and this allows the “transformation” of go to ko well 5 in japanese is “go” and using this change we can chose to call it “ko”. And that’s how we now have names for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8! We only need names for the digits 0, 7 and 9. Because we use “shi” for 4 we can’t take the first mora from “shichi” hence we have called 7 “na” from “nana”.
As for 9 looking at this guys face smile despite the context of this scene naming this gesture “kuku” seems fitting to me at list as “kyukyu” sounds off for this scene.
And finally 0 as we went with convenience of which sounds best we can take a look at the “shilist” aka the list of numbers which use that “shi” gesture there is one and only one number with a 0 namely 260. As we now we names for the digits 1-9, namely hi, ni, mi, shi, ko, ro, na, ya and ku. we can almost complete give 260 a name and consulting the table from the goroawase table and fitting nirore doesn’t sounds as good as niroma! hence we called 0 ma from maru!

And that should conclude my rather lengthy introduction into fingerbinary series! tho most of if was on naming conventions i use for convenience and to weaken certain vulgar gestures. as this is my first time writing a “blog” like this i hope to hear if things were perhaps confusing and/or if you guys have any questions regarding finger binary

Let’s start of on familiar grounds. Looking at the image of this post and using what we’ve discussed so far we can see it is hini hero on the minite which is, if we recall correctly, (1+2+16)×32 which is 19×32 or 608. So Romaya! Which is based on the question “which fingers are bent?”. Now then let’s find Romaya’s complement! First off which fingers are bent? It appears to be appears to be a shiya on minite. which means it is (4+8)×32 or 12×32. So the complement of Romaya is: 384 or miyashi xD on minite that is…..
On hite, which we have ignored because it all fingers are bent so it was 0 or ma. In other words the complement of Ma is the Hinishiya Hero! on hite that is 1+2+4+8+16 or 31!
So with that we now have miyashi mihi and mihi sounds weird consulting the wikipedia for goroawase we can “i” can also be used so miyashi mī which is 384+31 or 415!
So Romaya’s complement is Shīko!
now it is interesting to note that Romaya+Shīko is 608+415 or 1023 aka Himanimi!
and well Ma+Mī is well Mī……why is that interesting? Let’s see what the complements of the other posts are then!

working backwards we have Roro, Yarona, Kuku and Hiniya!
lets start with Roro. The fingers that are bent are Hishiya Hero on both minite and hite, let’s consider the hi bent for variety. That means we have (1+4+8+16)×32+(1+4+8+16) or 29×32+29 which is 928+29 or 957. That means the complement of Roro is Kukona!
now Roro+Kukona=66+957 or 1023 :3 sound familiar? yes! it is Himanimi!

Let’s look at Yarona next. The bent fingers are shi on minite and shiya hero on hite. So we have 4×32+(4+8+16) or 4×32+28 which is 128+28 or 156. That means the complement of Yarona is Hikoro! now what is Hikoro+Yarona? 156+867 is 1023! Himanimi again‽

Kuku! Next is Kuku! the bent finger are shiya hero on both hands. we have calculated shiya hero previously so we have 28×32+28 or 896+28 which is 924! So Kuku’s complement is: Kunishi! And Kunishi+Kuku is, you guessed it, 924+99 or 1023 aka Himanimi!

Finally we have Hiniya! The minite is off screen so we’ll consider that as a Hinishiya Hero. So what fingers are bent on the hite? It is a Shi Hero! Oh my, sounds deadly‽:3
So we have a hinishiya hero and a shi hero. That sums up to 31×32+4+16 or 992+20 which is 1012 aka Himahini! So then what’s Hiniya+Himahini? You better believe it! It is 11+1012 or 1023! yes it is Himanimi!

We can this complement the “two hand complement” but most people who are familiar with binary know this as a 10 bit one’s complement! There’s also an “one hand complement” better known as the 5-bit one’s complement. remember 19×32, Romaya’s complement on minite is Miyashi or 12×32! notice 19+12=31 or mī! you can also see it easily with Hiniya! Hiniya’s one hand compliment is: Shi Hero! In other words 1+2+8 is the one hand complement of 4+16 aka 11+20=31!
In short one hand complements always sum up to 31 while two hands complements sum up to 1023! Which also sums up what the maximum number is that you can count to on one and two hands respectively.

And now I realize we never gave Hiniya a proper name! Hiniya would be Hihi which is the reason, that i forgot to mention, why Hiniya is such a nice greeting :3
we have been using two types of names simultaneously and it appears i never really explained them except how to come up with them silly me (ﾉ≧ڡ≦)
But this post is long enough so that’s for another post!

Hiniya! :3
Continuing on what Kuku & Yarona were saying— i mean what we were saying in Kuku & Yarona I’m actually not sure if i should call the featured image kuku or roro (´・ω・`)
that actually depends on what our definition is of “bent” if we consider the hi-fingers bent this would be roro or 66 if not tis just kuku

But enough about that! this post will not be about that instead it about why in japanese counting they usually count yon instead of shi and why that’s even relevant to finger binary (´・ω・`) The answer can be given in one word “tetra-phobia”.
……well that’s a mouthful let me try and explain.

As we’ve seen in the Origin of the Hinishiya Hero Japanese have different ways of counting, but that post didn’t explain why Japanese have so many counting systems…..
The reason is simple: Kanji.
Kanji makes Japanese look very similar to Chinese to beginners and the reason for that is also simple:Kanji was imported from Chinese into Japanese. For that reason kanji have at least two readings “on” reading which is kinda a “chinese way” of reading them, based on the japanese perception of “chinese sounds” aka how they hear chinese vocabulary and “kun” reading which the “japanese way” of reading them based on japanese vocabulary. TLDR; kanji are “loan words”.
Kanji don’t natively convey how they should be read, in fact they only natively convey meaning. Think traffic signals xD. the reading is usually determined by context or convenience. And if that wasn’t enough they have a lot of homophones— words that sound the same, which brings us back to our original topic: Shiyon〜

It so happens that shi, the word we use for 4, sounds exactly like they’re word for drumroll DEATH‽ that’s right 4 and death are homophones………luckily the japanese have a synonym for 4: yon, the Chinese weren’t so lucky. there you go now you know why chinese and japanese are not a fan of the number 4 but that begs the question why in the world did i then choose to name the middle finger “shi”…………

Wait a minute‽ We have discussed up till now what gestures mean in finger binary, but all the gestures had multiple fingers raised! Like hiniya, kuku & yarona. So what happens when only one finger is raised? the answer lies in the intro of this post
“if we consider the hi-fingers bent this would be roro or 66 if not tis just kuku”
So conversly if we consider the hi on both hands as “raised” then it is just 99 as we’ve discussed in the post linked earlier. But if we consider both of them “bent” then only “ni” is raised on both hands, which would be roro or 66. Where ni on hite is 2 and ni on minite is 64!

What does this mean? this means that the gestures for 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512 each have one finger raised! And which fingers would be raised for 4 and 128?
you got it our “death” fingers, our “shi” fingers, our middle fingers! yes that very finger that most people use to show frustration! What a coincedence! And that’s isn’t enough “shi” looks like a fairly familiar word used in english to vent frustration as well orz

But wait, there’s more we haven’t mentioned the different combinations possible 1 finger gestures! But to stay relevant to this post the gestures that use the “shi” gesture. There are 63 of them! They are: 4, 36, 68, 100, 128, 129, 130,131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 164, 196, 228, 260, 292, 324, 356, 388, 420, 452, 484, 516, 548, 580, 612, 644, 676, 708, 740, 772, 804, 836, 868, 900, 932, 964 and 996
Fes that’s quote few…….we should give them names, no? :3

Let’s start with the most “dangerous” of them all 132: this one involves raised the “shi” finger on both hands! what could be worst then that lahahaha!
to give them a name we can use goroawase as usual……and it turns out both “himitsu” and “hissatsu” are possible names xD
uncanny, no? what is uncanny? In case you haven’t checked the links yet “himitsu” is a Japanese word that means “secret”! While hissatsu is also a Japanese word that can mean “deadly”, both of which seem so fitting :^3 also note we used different syllables for ni and mi in this case‽

Now for the rest!
Up till just now we’ve used consistent names for 1-9…..with the exception of 5 because we haven’t encountered it yet. Up till now we have used 0, hi, ni, mi, shi, 5, ro, na, ya and ku. So we need names for 0 and 5 to cover our shi list :3 After consulting the wikipedia page for goroawase and the shi list “ko” looks like an idea for 5 and “ma” for 0

As the shilist is rather long it would be boring to just list it off…as such maybe we could make poem out of it :3
so without further ado here is the shi “poem”:

shi,
miro, roya, himama,

hiniya,
hiniku, himima,
himihi, himini, himimi, himishi,
himiko, himiro, himina, himiya,

himiku, hishima,
hishihi, hishini, hishimi, hishishi,
hishiko, hishiro, hishina, hishiya,

hishiku, hikoma,
hikohi, hikoni, hikomi, hikoshi,
hikoko, hikoro, hikona, hikoya,

hikoku, hiroshi, hikuro,
niniya, niroma, nikuni,
minishi, mikoro, miyaya,
shinima, shikoni, shiyashi,
kohiro, koshiya, koyama,
rohini, roshishi, ronaro,
namaya, nashima, nanani,
yamashi, yamiro, yaroya
kumama, kumini, kuroshi, kukuro.

Phew pretty long, huh? And it doesn’t really sounds like a poem ∠(｀・ω・´) As it is so long, here’s some highlights: it turns out some like hiniku and kohiro sound like legit words :3
kohiro sounds like a pun on “little hero” and hiniku is the Japanese word for “irony”!
That said, we used the consistent names we’ve been using since the first post for this “poem”, as can be seen in “himini” instead of “himitsu” or “hissatsu.” Words like  hishishi sounds “off” as such we could still improve the “poem” by using alternate reading, for example if we use “yo” for the second “shi” in hishishi it’d would be “hishiyo” which with some grammar magic can mean “secret book” among others.

But wait doesn’t hiniya sound familiar? hiniya………hiniya………wait a minute isn’t that the name of the first post?! Turns out that’s the first ambiguous word we have created! How did this happen? It happened because we chose the same syllable to name our numbers as we did our fingers :3 The result is we have a hiniya gesture and a hiniya number! This is not the only ambigious word we will created either. In fact any combination of hi, ni, shi and ya in that order will be ambiguous! In fact there are exactly nine others matter for us: hinishi(7/124), hishiya(13/148), nishiya (14/248), hini(3/12), hishi(5/14), hiya(9/18), nishi(6/26), niya(10/28) and  shiya(12/48).
The 5 we’ve not included hinishiya, of which the number representation is larger then we’ll be using aka 1248 is larger then we count on both hands and it’s components hi, ni, shi and ya which represent both the gesture and the number accurately….. to be complete the final one 16 also represents both the gesture and the number and is already used as a number in the gestures so that one won’t cause trouble :3
If we want to resolve the issues caused by these 10 numbers all we need to do is use different names for numbers in question like instead of hiniya for 128 we could call it iniya :^3

From hiniya to Kuku or Roro Shiyon〜 we have considered the question “is the finger raised?”,  it could’ve as well been “is the finger bent?”.
But that is for another post!

And with that recap let’s first talk about kuku from the Hinishiya Hero, sorry puns i can’t resist them haha, in the post, that I linked twice for emphasis, I said I’d explain why the image of the said post is a representation of 99 or kuku and why “shi” is usually replaced by “yon” in japanese.
And as i already said in this post we’ll talk about kuku i’ll dedicate another post for shiyo ;). so without further ado

as explained in hiniya the value a gesture has is “calculated” from which fingers are raised. If we take another look at tthe “hinishiya hero” and the image of this post yes i’m refering to the posts not the characters

In both images we can see fingers are raised on both hands. for simplicity let’s focus on the hinishiya hero because, as we can see the hi and ni fingers are raised on both hands. that makes things easier :3 as we can recall from hiniya that would make it “hini” on one hand, which is 1+2 or 3, so how does that become 99? well if we look at the names we’ve chosen there’s some regularity in there: each number is twice the last; 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 now if we were to continue at this rate on the other hand from hi to hero the finger of that hand would be 32, 64, 128, 256, 512…..well that escalated quickly

Now if take hini on that hand we’d have 32+64 or 96, add that to the 3 we got before and we have our 99 \o/ but that could be bit confusing……why is hini on one hand 3 and 96 on another? it should be 3 right? To be consistent and all…..
Actually it is! hini on the second hand is 3 times 32‽‽ notice that hi on the second hand is 32 while it was 1 on the first…..

As second and first hand become a bit of a mouthful I’ll use some goroawase :^3
as such we’ll call 32 “mini” and hand we’ll call “te”. We’ve established I hope 1 as “hi”
as such the second hand we’ll we called “minite” and first hand will be called “hite”. An addition for doing is that the hand on the left is the “second” hand will the other one is the “first”……tldr; to avoid confusion

now the hi on hite was 1 and hi on minite was 32 and hini on hite is 3 while hini on minite is 96, so we can say the value is hini times hi. and sure enough
hini one hite is 3*1 which is 3 obviously and hini on minite is 3*32 which is 96!
this is why the picture of the Hinishiya Hero is kuku or 99

Pop Quiz!
what is the value of this post’s picture?
well on minite we have hiniya hero which is 1+2+8+16 or 27
and on hite we have hini which is 1+2 or 3
finally hiniya hero on minite is then 27*32 or 864
so this post picture is then 864+3 or 867 in finger binary xD

notice that the names gives a hint of the value; this why i say we’ll call 32 “mini” and hand “te”, all values of the “minite” are multiples of 32 or “mini”! While all the values on hite are multiple of 1 or “hi” which just itself
now using the same “goroawase” 867 is yarona

I’ll try to explain in this post :3
Most of you may or may not have recognized the pictures i used as being from anime
some of you may even recognize the anime xD
That alone may have been a hint the names hi ni shi ya and hero comes from japanese‽
But wait the japanese don’t count like that right?
well yes and no

the Japanese actually have three ways of counting!
The first way is one we’re, probably, all familiar with:
ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyuu/ku, jyuu
Though “shi” and “shichi” aren’t used that much and are usually replaced by “yon” and “nana” these two are actually part of an older way of counting that is sometimes still used.
That bring us to the second counting system which is often known as the “native” system:
hi, fu, mi, yo(n), itsu, mu, nana, ya, koko, tou
As you can probably already see i took 2 “names” from each of these two systems namely
hi and ya from the native and ni and shi from the usual system but i mentioned they have 3 systems….
well the third system is actually english but written out in japanese:
wan, tsū, surī, fō, faibu, sｈikusu, sebun, eito, nain, ten
i know, i know almost unrecognizable but if you run these through a text-to-speech english it’ll sound “engrish”
This is also an nice example that sounds in a language aren’t confined to one writing system. And yes in all three cases are counting from 1-10

But back to the topic i haven’t explained why the pinky is called hero….
instead i may or may have confused you with unneccesary or unrelated trivia about japanese counting haha.
well actually it is related :3
you see these three systems are mixed and matched sticked together, like I did with “hiniya”, and in what is known as “goroawase”.

Goroawase is crudely said a system for making puns :^3
aaaand yes that means “hero” is a pun made with number lahahaha
how does it work?
it takes the first syllable of a number out of any of the three number systems and just sticks them together
For example 16 is made out of a 1 and a 6, one in the native system is “hi” and 6 in the usual system is “roku”. So taking the “ro” from roku and the “hi” we get “hiro” which in japanese sounds awfully like the english “hero”

Extra the picture can be read as 99 or using the system we just discussed as “kuku” which sounds like a viable one piece laughter :3
how is it 99? and why is “shi” usually replaced with “yon” i’ll try to explain that in two another posts :3

To begin we’ll rename every one of our fingers:
the thumb we’ll call “one”, “1” or “hi”
the index finger we’ll call “two”, “2” or “ni”
the middle finger we’ll call “four”, “4” or “shi”
the ring finger we’ll call “eight”, “8” or “ya”
the pinky we’ll call “Six-teen”, “16” or “hero”
All three names all mean the same thing. yes in this context “hero” means 16

now that we’ve given them new names we’ll use them in a example:
in the picture you can see that “hi”, “ni” and “ya” are raised, while “shi” and “hero” are not so this gesture can be read as “hiniya” xD

But wait‽ you’ll probably think what does this  have to do with binary?
welll…. as i’ve said all three names mean the same thing sooo
hiniya is read as 1+2+8 or 11 :^3
so that gesture is actually 11 in finger binary!!

now if we keep in mind that in the picture the hi, ni and ya fingers are raised while the shi and hero fingers are not
we can then ask the question “is the finger raised?” for each finger.
if yes=1 and no=0 then going from hi to hero the answer would be 11010
and the binary form of 11 is just that:11010

but where did the names hi, ni, shi, ya, hero come from i’ll explain that in another post :3