Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Odd thing.

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Thursday, July 11, 2002, 3:30
Tim Talpas wrote:
>There seems to be a trend in some FU langs where the words for 8 and 9 >are based on the number 10... in the same manner of finnish... > >like mansi 10 "lov", 9 "ontolov", 8 "nyololov" (or something like that) >
The same thing has happened in Malay and several languages influenced by it: Ml. delapan 8 < **dua alapan 'two takings' Sundanese/Makassarese salapan(g) 9 < sa alapan 'one taking' Ml. itself adapted another word here-- sembilan < **sa ambilan 'one taking' (probably when alap was replaced by ambil; presumably some earlier form of Ml. must have had selapan, the source of the Sund. and Mak. forms, via trade. Ml. also innovated a word for 7, tujuh (also borrowed by Mak.) related to a word for 'to point' (i.e. with the index finger). Buginese and other South Celebes langs., related to Mak., also innovated, but used native terms-- kadua 8 < 'second', kasera 9 presumably 'first', but the form sera does not otherwise occur. The point is that Malayo-Polynesian had perfectly good words for all the numbers 1-10, and they survive almost everywhere else, including Javanese, which has had almost as much influence on langs. of the area as Malay.