From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 34176
Date: 2004-09-16
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Exu Yangi" <exuyangi@...> wrote:
Exu Yangi:
> > >one = Chinese erh = Japanese i(chi)
> > >two = chinese ni = japanese ni
> > >three = chinese sam = japanese san
> > >four = chinese shi = japanese shi
> > >five = chinese go = japanese go
Petusek:
> >Thanks for the list of the first five numerals in Japanese. In Old
> >Japanese,
> >the first decade was organized in pairs:
> >
> >1 fitö 2 futa
> >3 mi 6 mu
> >4 yö 8 ya
> >5 i-tu 10 töwö
>
> I have seen that. Kind of like organizing English as
> one
> two three
> four five
> six seven
> eight n-ine
> ten
>
> and then saying that the first letters must make them related.
> Ummm ...
Well there does seem a cross-linguistic tendency for short runs with
the same initial letter. Has anyone checked the statistics on it?
It's not as simple as it seems, for it seems that numbers above 5 can
share a common morpheme.
Which Chinese dialect is quoted above? The Middle Chinese for '5' is
reconstructed as something like *ngú, previously unvoiced or
preaspirated, so Thai for example has converted the Proto-Chinese
sequence *hŋá` *gruk 'five, six' to an alliterating haa 51 hok 22.
(Forms taken from tables indexed at
http://www.zompist.com/numbers.shtml .) With the addition of /sawng
15/ 'two', the sequence 2, 3, 4 is now an alliterative run.
Perhaps there is a similar organising tendency behind the Japanese
numbers, though it seems a lot rarer. I suppose it's possible that
pre-PIE had such a 'system' - all that's left is the similarity of
the words for '4' and '8'.
Richard.