--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elevans1" wrote:
> And thank you, Lars, I had often wondered why in Russian the numbers 2
> through 4 were treated differently from other numbers I considered to
> be similarly plural from an English perspective. I never thought of
> the thumb vs. 4 long fingers explanation!
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "squilluncus" <grvs@> wrote:
> > Also Russian gen plur from five but two to four with
> > gen sing.
> > There seems to have been two systems originally:
> > one only counting the long fingers, one also including
> > the thumb.
It's not an explanation for the Russian behaviour. While it may be
natural to group things in fours, the Russian behaviour is simply a
generalisation of the dual misinterpreted as a genitive singular.
Also, while French and Italian have 'six-ten' and then 'ten-seven',
Spanish has 'five-ten' and then 'ten-six'.
Contrary to Lars's interesting article, numerals embedding nouns are
not so odd. On the borders of the English numeral system we have
'three score years and ten'.
What, I wonder, does Lars make of 'phan ha:' in Thai? Literally is
'thousand five', but it usually means 1500 rather then 1005. The loss
of the lesser base in this fashion is quite common in Thai. It may
just be that round numbers have their own peculiarities. In English,
it is quite common to hear, for example, 60 pronounced 'six oh' to
avoid confusion with 16, but 61 is always 'sixty one'.
Richard.