Re: The Dravidian Salesman

From: tgpedersen
Message: 13016
Date: 2002-04-04

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: x99lynx@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 7:33 AM
> Subject: [tied] The Dravidian Salesman
>
>
> > If Dravidians were selling raw materials to I-A's, it would just
be effective business to at least partially communicate with your
customer in his language. And those kinds of partial borrowings
would (and do today) back up through the distribution pipeline. It's
the buyer who writes the specs, EVEN if the buyer is a unprestigious
slob who just happens to have money to spend.
>
As the Germans (some Germans!) say: "Du wollen mein Geld, du sprechen
meine Sprache" ;-)

> > On the other hand, I don't see many Dravidians trying to impress
their friends and neighbors by counting from four to ten in Indo-
Aryan.
>
> This explanation has been invented ad hoc. Were the early
Dravidians full-time traders, selling things to the Indo-Aryans? Were
they so obsessed with numbers and the raw-material trade that they
spoke to each other as they would have spoken to their non-Dravidian
customers? I wonder why the Polish Jews' Yiddish didn't absorb the
Polish numerals, then. Why, come to think of it, did Crimean Gothic
borrow the Iranian numerals '100' and '1000' (Cr.Goth. sada, hazer)?
>
> By the way, whatever the reason, the Iranian numerals were highly
borrowable. The Proto-Finno-Ugric speakers took a handful
(including '100', but I don't know if such a high numeral is
reconstructible for Proto-Uralic), and later the Slavs probably
borrowed Old Iranian *sata '100', though they kept their North
European word for '1000' (shared with Baltic and Germanic).
>
> Piotr

Danish numerals are used a lot in Greenland Inuit, as you may hear in
the Dansih State Radio's news broadcasts in that language (especially
years). Why that is so, I don't know. The numbers 1-10 are all three-
or four-syllabic, which may be why. Or perhaps the Danish numerals
came with along arithmetic?
And how about Chinese numerals in Japanese?

One account I read by a Norwegian linguist told of one child picking
up the old, meanwhile forgotten Aleutian numbers 1-10, from him on
his second visit 30 years later to those islands, and using them to
impress his friends.

Torsten