Re: numerals

Guillaume:

>If Kartvelian and IE have indeed loaned numerals from semitic in a >way or
>another, it must be for a precise reason; Ante Aikio that I >already cited
>said that some Uralic languages loaned numerals from >IE [...] but not all
>numerals, specifically seven. He attributes >this to the number of day in a
>week (and other things that I forgot >and could'nt cite from memory).

I attribute this to the fact that otherwise, the Uralic word for "seven"
would be a compound word meaning "three from ten" (cf. kahdeksan, yhdeksan).
We would have expected something like Finnish *koldeksan for "seven", a
rather long word. To me, the borrowing of "seven" was functional as well as
potentially religious or cultural. On the one hand, it could replace a long
number for easier counting (assuming that a Steppe form *ral had been
already replaced with "three from ten", but I digress) but also perhaps
because the word "seven" is something more important.

I don't quite follow that this is because it is associated with things
"weekly". I believe that the early Hebrews had a thing with numerology,
didn't they? Does anyone know more about this? How ancient is the
association of "6" and "7" to "evil" and "good"? Could this be a Semitic
concept? Just a thought.

>In languages of China, higher numerals tend to be loaned from >chinese,
>whereas lower numeral remain native.

Not surprising and I'm already aware of this. Of course, you also have the
situation with Korean and Japanese where an original set is kept but a new
Chinese set is applied for a special function.

>In some tibeto-burman languages, the original TB numerals have
>remained, and they are clearly unrelated to chinese "two" Kachin :
>lakh�ng Bai : ko~; "one" : I remeber only tangut : a, but I know many
>iother TB languages also have a for "one", Mirish languages or
>Bodo-garo, but I don't know much on those.

Sounds like you're talking about one and the same numeral: SinoTibetan
*knhis (Cantonese yi). If Bai has a nasalised vowel then I would say that
*knhis is probably the origin, nespa? Words for "one" and other low numerals
often change, being replaced by other native words that serve a similar
function. (ie: "couple" -> "two"; "this/that", "single" -> "one", etc)

>Therefore, the Semito-IE-Kartvelian situation is quite abnormal as
>regard to how numbers are loaned; it means that it is not really
>through commerce that the numeral "seven" was loaned, I think.

No, that's why I suggest a religious connotation to the motivation of
borrowing "six" and "seven".

- gLeN

______________________________________________________