Re: Borrowed numerals (was: Inuktitut (Canada))

From:    Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
> Isaac Penzev wrote:
> > Danny Wier scripsit:
> > > <<Being a purist in a lot of things, I wonder why a language would
> > > borrow from other languages for numbers less than a hundred! Swahili
> > > does borrow 'six', 'seven' and 'nine' from Arabic, but that's Swahili.>>
> >
> > AFAIK, Komi uses Russian numerals for numbers higher than ten.
>
> Japanese has borrowed Chinese numerals.
It's really not all that unusual for languages that have existed for
long stretches of time under some kind of colonial context to have
borrowed several or indeed all numbers from the colonial language.
Georgian, e.g., uses Russian numerals exclusive when saying phone-
numbers outloud. Thai, apparently, was for the longest time assumed
to be most closely related to Sino-Tibetan, but this was based to
a significant degree on the clear similarity of the number systems.
It is now thought that these numbers were borrowed from Sino-Tibetan,
and Thai along with its sister Tai languages is more closely related
to Austronesian and Miao-Yao.  And of course English borrowed one
number, the ordinal of "two", from Latin/French, as the citation
ordinal. ("Other" has of course remained with altered semantics.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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