When you count, you recite a memorized series of words while pointing to things one after another. In other words, you're doing the same thing children do when they do "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor" or "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe." In many languages, the counting numbers even have poem-like structures of rhyme and alliteration. This is particularly obvious in Japanese (as I discovered when we had to chant the On numbers while doing karate exercises; the Kun numbers are even more structured), but you can see it in English (o, t, t, f, f, s, s), Russian (
syem,
vosyem,
dyevyat,
dyesyat), and various others.
What's more likely -- that early people first came up with abstract words meaning things like "seven" and then invented counting, or that they began with tinker-tailor style counting and then the words used in the rhyme came to represent abstract numbers, much as do-re-mi developed out of the lyrics to a hymn? My money's on the latter.
I wonder if the original meanings of any of the counting rhymes can still be reconstructed this late in the day?
3 comments:
what an amazing and curious thought. thank you for this
Hickory dickory dock are supposed to be numbers too.
This made me curious to check what the numbers are for my spare-time conlang effort which relies heavily on intuitive data. I got:
ih ti quae yi
lei fif le'yim
tui'yi quae'fui
tui'lei en'firrh
firrh chef yi'cef
lei'fui khim'ri
This seems... catchy, but it has the downside of not having consistent pacing i.e. in other languages, most numbers up to ten are monosyllabic for counting along an even rhythm. In this example, the counting system thresholds at four ('more') and sixteen ('team'), and after analysis it does have nursery-rhyme resonance through 'the unlucky numbers' near the end: "twelve, mess {thirteen}, more mess, then thrive five {fifteen}, and a team {sixteen}"
Since I'm borrowing concepts from First Nations languages, I went and checked Plains Cree:
p'yak nisoo nisto ne'wo nikotwasik tepakop eyinanew kekac-mitatat mitatat
https://www.omniglot.com/language/numbers/plainscree.htm
From youtube videos, it does not sound as awkward as it looks, but definitely not monosyllabic either.
Next I checked how the undisputed monarch of conlangs Tolkien does this in Quenya:
minë atta neldë canta lempë enque otso tolto nertë quain
Starts catchy, falls flat to my ears at 'tolto'. Sindarin:
mîn tâd nêl canad leben eneg odog tolodh neder pae
Not bad, but I'm not sure how much time spent imagining the Elves as children playing counting-games....
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