06-11-03 19:43, wtsdv wrote:
>> The Danish twenty-count (it made as little sense to me as a
>> child as to any foreigner) originates in Jutland; until the
>> loss of the Scanian lands it competed with ten-count decade
>> names, after that it became predominant. Twenty-count is found
>> in Southern Italy too (and Faroese). Traditionally the twenty-
>> count is ascribed to a Celtic substrate.
>
> The Ossetes also use a vigesimal system.
There are traces of a vigesimal system in Albanian as well: the word for
'20' is <një-zet>, literally 'one-twenty', and the word for '40' is
<dy-zet> 'two-twenty'. <tre-zet> '60' and <katër-zet> '80' can be found
in the Albanian dialects spoken in Italy. I wonder if vigesimal counting
in Albanian is due to the influence of dialectal Italian.
I think it's significant that *(d)wi-(d)k^m.t-ih1, the PIE word for
'20', involved a dual and that in many branches it came to differ
structurally from the other decadic terms. As a result, it became
unanalysable, like the basic number terms (the cardinals from 'one' to
'ten'); the same happened to the word for 'one hundred', *(d)k^m.tom,
reanalysed as a simplex primitive term, no longer synchronically
connected with *dek^m.(t). When the other terms for decads were
restructured (compounds into phrases), '20' resisted change in several
branches and became independent, just like '100'. It was therefore
available as a counting unit.
Piotr