Re: Historical Sound Change & Numbers Puzzle

2007/3/10, Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...>:
> For those of you interested in language change over time, here's a
> descendant version of the interlinear I posted a few days ago:
> http://www.geocities.com/altyaltynalma/northwindandsun_nfolk.html
>
> And the original for comparison:
> http://www.geocities.com/altyaltynalma/northwindandsun_gn.html
>
> So if you've figured out how the one descends from the other (not too
> complicated), here's a puzzle for you.  The following numbers are in the
> descendant language.  They make a fairly standard base-10 number
> system.  Can you figure out how the ancestral number system worked?
I tried, but I can't!

I guess 5=si is from ancestral se, and 10=neru is from ancestral nelru.
Apart from that, I'm completely lost. Especially,

3=wec, 8=nel, 30=bornel, 50=borwec?

Others, any idea?

> 1 - ba
> 2 - ru
> 3 - wec
> 4 - wepa
> 5 - si
> 6 - seba
> 7 - seru
> 8 - nel
> 9 - nelba
> 10 - neru
> 20 - ceseru
> 30 - bornel
> 40 - mospa
> 50 - borwec
> 60 - consi
> 70 - contef
> 80 - condor
> 90 - yuca
> 100 - yushnel
> 1000 - shnew
--
Seo Sanghyeon

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