Numbers from 1 to 10

[mmcirvin]

littledevi's post about etymologies reminded me of the extreme coolness of this collection of numbers from 1 to 10 in over 4500 languages.

It's remarkable how instantly recognizable the reconstructed proto-Indo-European terms are as "numbers from 1 to 10." The same is true of even many of the Indian and Iranian languages in the family. But go outside the Indo-European family and suddenly an English speaker is very much lost.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

More and more things stick out as peculiar when you look closely at these lists... for instance, Armenian is classed as Indo-European, but the number names are highly unusual. Various sources say it's got lots of borrowings, but from what, in this case, I'm not sure. Of course, that part of the world has all manner of language families existing in close contact.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Man, if you try searching for answers to these questions on Google, you run into some serious craziness really fast.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Armenian apparently has a traditional numbering system that uses letters in their alphabet, so that the first letters in the alphabet represent 1-10, and subsequent ones represent multiples of 10, 100 and 1000. It's a little like the Hebrew system. Maybe those odd number names came from the letters?...

...Nope, the names aren't the same at all. I give up.

Numbers in Armenian

[acw.livejournal.com]

Armenian was one of the last languages to be included in the Indo-European synthesis. The executive summary: a history of seriously major sound changes have made the relationships hard to see, but they are still real. "Erku" really is a predictable version of "dwo". It's a pretty weird story.