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The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development by Levi Leonard Conant
page 33 of 286 (11%)
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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