The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development by Levi Leonard Conant
page 33 of 286 (11%)
page 33 of 286 (11%)
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a class of words whose original meanings appear to be entirely lost. They
are what may be termed the numerals proper--the native, uncompounded words used to signify number. Such words are the one, two, three, etc., of English; the eins, zwei, drei, etc., of German; words which must at some time, in some prehistoric language, have had definite meanings entirely apart from those which they now convey to our minds. In savage languages it is sometimes possible to detect these meanings, and thus to obtain possession of the clue that leads to the development, in the barbarian's rude mind, of a count scale--a number system. But in languages like those of modern Europe, the pedigree claimed by numerals is so long that, in the successive changes through which they have passed, all trace of their origin seems to have been lost. The actual number of such words is, however, surprisingly small in any language. In English we count by simple words only to 10. From this point onward all our numerals except "hundred" and "thousand" are compounds and combinations of the names of smaller numbers. The words we employ to designate the higher orders of units, as million, billion, trillion, etc., are appropriated bodily from the Italian; and the native words _pair_, _tale_, _brace_, _dozen_, _gross_, and _score_, can hardly be classed as numerals in the strict sense of the word. German possesses exactly the same number of native words in its numeral scale as English; and the same may be said of the Teutonic languages generally, as well as of the Celtic, the Latin, the Slavonic, and the Basque. This is, in fact, the universal method observed in the formation of any numeral scale, though the actual number of simple words may vary. The Chiquito language has but one numeral of any kind whatever; English contains twelve simple terms; Sanskrit has twenty-seven, while Japanese possesses twenty-four, and the Chinese a number almost equally great. Very many languages, as might be expected, contain special numeral expressions, such as the German _dutzend_ and the |
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