Re: [tied] Re: Numerals query again

About numerals and twenties: There's nothing strange (in the sense of
uncommon) about counting in twenties at least < 100. In IE-lgs it happens
all over, to the list mentioned by other I can add e.g Slovincian, Crimean
Gothic and areally in a whole bunch of Indo-Iranian lgs (There's an article by
Joy Edel'man about those). That of (dialectal) Italian is btw attributed to
French travel/trade influence in the article on French in _Indo-European
Numerals_ ed. Gvozdanovic. It's of course also common (but base 10 is
still commoner) in other parts of the world, notably North America. E.g
the Californian native American lgs were comprehensively surveyed in the
very early 1900s and a great many of them are 20:s. Some, variously in
Meso-America, are completely base-20 in that the next atoms are 400, 8000
.. and not 100, 1000 etc. But all are mixed, 5-10-20 or 5-20 when counting
within the twenties. In fact, neither I nor the literature on the subject
know of any language which has atoms over 10 (at least diachronically).

The 20-count in the IE languages I mentioned in the original query
have all innovated it in that they were originally IE-decimal. But I have
a difficulties finding information even on when they got it and so on, the
origin question aside. It's hard to believe howvere that Piotr for example
doesn't know anything about the distribution and age of the score-counts
in older stages of English or that Jens doesn't know how long the Danes
have counted so peculiarly :-)

thanks for all answers (i'll scream higher in the future),
Harald

ps.
Also, there was some discussion on Guanche numerals some time ago. If
you don't already know of it there's books and articles by Vaclav Blazek
that have all kinds of ideas on their origin.