answer:My seventh-grade math teacher asked us what was essentially the same question. She held up three fingers on each hand and asked us how we would count if this were what our hands were like. She let us puzzle over it for a while. Finally she explained that “this many” (the number we represent with the symbol “6”) would be “ten” in our counting system. We’d be operating in base 6. She taught us to count and do arithmetic in base 6, base 8, and base 16, and, most interesting of all, base 2 (binary). She taught us what zero means. Earlier, she had taught us the difference between a number and a numeral and said that “this many” (holding up fingers) was a number, while a numeral was only a symbol that stood for that many. By the time she got to different bases, we were ready for the abstraction. This was in 1958. So yes, I think “this many” (the value we represent with the symbols we call “twelve”) would be equal to the base of our arithmetic system, which we call “ten.” A full column on the abacus would have “this many” beads: o o o o o o o o o o o o and when we filled the column, we would call it “ten,” it would end with a zero, and we would move over one row.