Re: The Dravidian Salesman

--- In cybalist@..., x99lynx@... wrote:

>
> <I wonder why the Polish Jews' Yiddish didn't absorb the Polish

numerals,

> then. Why, come to think of it, did Crimean Gothic borrow the

Iranian

> numerals '100' and '1000' (Cr.Goth. sada, hazer)?>
>
> If there were econonic reasons, economic analysis might tell you

why. Both

> Karl Marx and Ronald McDonald will tell you that history moves by

its

> stomach. And even if Hegel is sometimes right, if history is

sometimes led

> by its head, humans are driven by a lot more in their heads than

prestige.

> Besides you can't eat prestige. I don't know about Yiddish, but

Crimean

> Gothic might have been asked to fill Iranian batch orders for those

famous

> Crimean Gothic Sausages in 100's or 1000's (or whatever it is that

Crimean

> Goths specialized in.) Maybe another extra-linguistic factor here

is the

> inscrutable human tendency to round-off numbers. :)
>
> Steve

Older Germanic languages had a "small hundred" (100) and a "large
hurdred" (120). With that kind of sloppy terminology, no wonder they
borrowed a more exact hundred from the Iranic-speakers (astronomers,
methematicians and all that).

Torsten