Re: Numbers ancient & modern (was: Unilang report)

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>
> In Latin, the two units before round numbers were always counted by subtraction,
> so:
> 18: duodeviginti (two from twenty)
> 19: undeviginti (one from twenty)
> 29: undetriginta (one from thirty)
> 98: duodecentum (two from one hundred)
> 99: undecentum (one from one hundred)
>
> I think that's the origin of the strange system used with Roman numbers :) .
>
Hm. Mansi (Uralic; Ob-Ugric) is like that too...

1 - akw
2 - kitiG
3 - xu:r@m
4 - Jila (where J is palatalised n)
5 - at
6 - xO:t
7 - sa:t
8 - Jol:ou = Jol+lou
9 - ont@l:ou = ont@l+lou
10 - lou

What [Jol] (cf. Hu /nyolc/ and [ont@l] mean, I'm not certain, but they
show up elsewhere:

What is quite interesting about Mansi (and also Khanty) numbers is:

20 - xus
21 - wa:t+nu:p@l+akwa (thirty+towards+one)
22 - wa:t+nu:p@l+kit
23 - wa:t+nu:p@l+xu:r@m
etc.

The tens, like this:

10 - lou
20 - xus
30 - wa:t
40 - naliman
50 - atpan
60 - xO:tpan
70 - sa:tpan
80 - Jolpan
90 - ont@lsa:t
100 - sa:t, also called [janIG sa:t] ([janIG] = large, big)

So here we see the [Jol] and [ont@l] again, but it still eludes me how it
works.

On another, sort-of related note, I've been thinking of late that the
Ugric branch of the Uralic tree is wrong. As it is it is:

Uralic - Samoyedic
    |
    |  - Finno-Ugric
                |
                | - Finnic
                |
                | - Ugric
                        |
                        | - Ob-Ugric
                        |       |
                        |       | - Mansi
                        |       |
                        |       | - Khanty
                        |
                        | - Hungarian

Lately I've been looking a lot at these languages and I'm starting to
seriously believe that it should be more like:


                                Ugric
                                  |
                                 / \
                                /   \
                            Mansi    Khanty
                             /         \
                            |           |
                            |- Hung.   -|

that is to say, a circle-like thing; or if not that, at least all three of
them simply as Ugric, because while there are a great number of
similarities between Mansi and Khanty, there are many features in
Hungarian which are found in Mansi or Khanty but not both...this is quite
the interesting thing...I'm going to work on this more and if any of you
are interested I'll tell you what I think...




-------ferko
Ferenc Gy. Valoczy

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