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I was looking at the tau lexicon on lexicanum today and I noted that I could only see seven digits in the tau alphabet, and I wondered if the tau used a different system to our Arabic decimal system. If I were the 3rd ed tau dx writer I would use the octal system (using eight digits) because they have four fingers on each hand, but who knows, they could have gained their system in a entirely different way to the humans. Or do they use the Arabic system at all.
Do they use the septenary system?

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tau_Lexicon

The Tau use base 8 (octal).

The official Tau font contains numbers 0 to 7.

You don't need the number 8 because it is represented as 10. Exactly the same as how there is no symbol for the number ten in Arabic numerals.

Japanese/Chinese and Roman numerals do include symbols for 10 and some higher numbers.

The symbols used for numbers don't matter, what matters is if your notation is positional, meaning that you make any larger number out of your basic 8 symbols in octal or 10 in decimal.

Calculations are greatly simplified.

its base 8, meaning 9 symbols for the numbers 0-7.


a base 8 system using Arabic symbols would look like this.

number zero=0

number one=1

number two=2

number three=3

number four=4

number five=5

number six=6

number seven=7

number eight=10

number nine=11

in this case, what we call the tens column is the T'aus eights column. our hundreds column would be the T'au 64s column(if i got that right)


replace Arabic symbols with T'au symbols and you have their system down.

that makes sense, because as I said tau have eight fingers.