Re: Nattiki

Brian Betty wrote:

>Matt a =E9crit: "The only numbers I remember are:
>ed      "one"
>zee     "two"
>fuu     "three"
>...
>pup     "six"
>...
>gao     "nine"
>sup     "ten"
>
>This is reminiscent of North Asian Chinese and Chinese-derived systems.
>Cantonese yat (/yet/), Mandarin yi < yit 1
>Mandarin jiu, Cantonese kaw 9
>Korean sip /Sip/ 10 =3D Mandarin shi /shr/
>... all derived from older Chinese forms now lost except through
>reconstructions. I think that the form 3 fuu is also familiar to me, but
>from which system I cannot say. Something in Southeast China, I think.
>
>Is this sheer chance, or not?
Unless my students were channeling Lao Tse that day, it's sheer
coincidence.  The numbers were all invented spontaneously by students
in the class.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them, who are
native speakers of languages other than English, have been slipping
'loanwords' from their native languages into Nattiki.  It might be
interesting to do a Greenberg-style comparison of Nattiki vocabulary
with that of other languages, just to see what comes up!  :-)

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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