Mark O:
>Not so much 'twice five' as 'two sets if fingers and thumbs;
>sinister+dexter'.
Ah. Now I know what you're talking about. You would divide *dekm into **de-
+ **-km where the former is supposed to be a corrupt form of *dWo- and the
latter being related to the idea of "grasping" (shows up in Nostratic
reconstructions). Thus one is tempted to presume **-km means "hand", right?
I really don't buy it. In fact, I still have trouble believing that the *d-
ever showed up in numbers higher than "10". The word "twenty" is often
reconstructed as *wiHkmtiH and supposedly derived from **wi-dkmtiH where the
lost *d caused compensatory lengthening of the previous vowel just like a
laryngeal would. Whatever :P
I'm still holding fast to my idea that *dekm was a defective stem, with
*kont- (senza il *d-) being the plural form. I would suggest something like
*wix-kntix for "twenty" and *kntom for "100" (not the unproven *dkmtom). The
word *dekm would simply be a fossil of an older compound literally meaning
"one ten".
I note also that Uralic languages have similar words for "decads":
Finnish /kymmenen/
Estonian /ku"mne/
Hungarian /hu'sz/ "20"
>I find it more plausible that 100 was built up from something based >on
>five and/or ten.
The word is certainly built on the word "tens" (*kont-) but hardly "five"
which we all know to be *penkWe.
- gLeN
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