From: malmqvist52@...
Message: 10613
Date: 2001-10-25
--- In cybalist@..., morten.thoresen@... wrote:
> Today we have at least three spesific words in norwegian
> for "describing" numbers also beeing numbers if I may express
myself
> so:
>
> dusin = 12 =dozen
>
> snes = 20
>
> tylft = 144 = 12 x 12 = tolv x tolv
>
> Snes is even today used for eggs in particular.
>
> Tylft I believe still is in use when talking about timber. (I'm not
> quite sure if actually today, but in the 70-80'ies, yes.)
Thanks for this I have these laftest few days gotten extemely
interested in ancient numerical systems and especially the
scandinavian (germanic?) ones.
In Sweden he also have a <tolft>, but I haven't been able to figure
out how many that is.
From this
page:http://www.humangeo.su.se/department/lhgo/Ordlista.htm#T I have:
"tolft: äldre territorriell indelnin under hundaret. Det antas att
tolft har något med siffran 12 att göra. Således skall en torlf betå
av 12 bol eller besuttenhetsenheter. Ordet finns i fyra uppländska
sockennamn exv. Husby Sjutolft."
trsl:
tolft: older territorrial partition below <hundaret>. It's assumeed
that t. has something to do with the figure twelve. Thus would a
<tolft> consist of 12 <bol> or property units The word exists in four
Uplandish <socken> names e. g. Husby Sjutolft."
I also found this from Norway:
"Stort hundre 10 Tylfter eller 6 snes eller 2 skok 10 Tylvfter
120 Stykker",
Tylvt omtales også som tylt eller tylft 12 Stykker
and: Gross 12 Dusin 144 Stykker
from:
http://enit.no/org/nff/N_M_E.htm
And I'm also a liitle confused now, and I'm thinking if it's not
known in Sweden exact what toft is then maybe it's the same in
Norway, so of course You could be right Morten.
But do you know where I can get more information?
I would greatly appreciate it.
I'm especially interested in the unit stort hundre.
If there is older systems in the germanic languages with other bases
than ten I think it looks quite illogical that these from the
beginning was mixed with each other.
the figure 120 seems to me very close to 121 which is 11*11
And in fact there is a swedish word here in Västergötland <elft>
meaning eleventh,
My suspicion (speculation if you wish) is that in ancient times we
had:
elft a coresp to. *stort hundra
11 121
tolft a corresp. to gross
12 144
Does anyome know anything more about this(or believe that there is a
chance that it could have been like this).
I also read in Gesenius article on hebrew mah that there exists
indogermanic(sic) roots/words mah and meh for G. "gross" being
related to <mag> which I understand is persian.
Maybe Gesenius was too early to be an expert in hisorical
linguistics, but I'm nonetheless interested in knowing more about
these words.
Do anyone here know where to start looking?
Of course I know that the numbers eleven and twelve should come from
germ. *twa(-)lifa and aina(-)lifa e. g. GHT einlif and Goth. twalif
and that this according to Våre arveord the *lifa comes from the
root *likw from the IE theme *ley-kw "leave, hand over,let be
returned" , so that *twalifa should mean "two over (ten)"
However sice I don't know so much about the semantics about *ley-kw
more than the above I'm left wondering if it really fit.
So far I have only lit. dvylika "twelve" to go on.
One other question. How does the k dissappear?
Best wishes
Anders