Reply To: Mathematical Expressions in Sefira Counting

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Sam2
Participant

You were Yotzei Popa but it would not hurt at all to count again without a Bracha afterwards.

Counting in math should not count. Saying today is 16+1 is really just saying that today is the day after the sixteenth.

There is an interesting Beur Halachah in Siman 65 (I think, somewhere around there) where he brings down from a Ritva I believe that a language only counts as a language (other than Hebrew and Greek) if it is the spoken tongue by the majority of people is one’s country (it’s also possible that country can be made smaller here; e.g. French might count in Quebec and English in the rest of Canada). No one holds like this, but we can still learn from it that you need to speak in an actual language. Mathematical formulae are a way to describe things, but should not count as a “spoken language”. Similarly, one should not be Yotzei if he counted in Esperanto or a similar made-up language that no one actually speaks. Something like that, and certainly binary, should not have the Halachic status of a language.