[tied] Re: IE right & 10

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

>
> Richard:
> > Should I take it from this you're confident that the superlative
> > suffix (PIE *mo) always had the precursor of the thematic vowel in
> > pre-PIE?
>
> I lost you. What does the superlative have to do with *dekm again?
> Are you talking about "tenth", a combination of *dekm + genitive
> *-os which later is analysed mistakingly as *dekm-mos with the help
> of its rhyming twin *septm-mos (a Semitic numeral)? There certainly
> is no **dek- meaning "ten" so it's very tentative to relate the two
> together based only on similar sounds.

At least for the purposes of playing Devil's Advocate, how is there
conclusively "no **dek- meaning 'ten'"? More on this below/later.

Also, the reconstructed IE word for "right" is *deksteros, correct?

> > Nostratic cognates:
> >
> > Uralic *peyngo 'fist, palm'
> > Altaic *p'aynga
>
> Maybe, maybe not. There's the matter of the odd *kW = g
> correspondance, for one thing. Granted, it's not a bad connection.

The Uralic reconstruction looks problematic to me (but then again I'm
just an amateur). What's its result in e.g. Finnish?

> > I wonder if *dek^ should be glossed as 'attain', with a sense of
> > attaining the correct standard. Then *dek^ without any extra
> > consonants might once have meant 'right (as opposed to left)'.
>
> Or... there's an old word for ten, namely *kum, which later surfaces
> as *dekm in IE with the addition of a now extinct word for "one"
> prefixed to it with cognates in Altaic, Uralic, ChukchiKamchatkan
> and Yukaghir. The plural is *kumit from whence we get the fossilized
> suffix *-kmt- in all decads above ten.

Actually, I can see where this could make sense here. For example,
the Finnish word for "ten" is _kymmenen_, stem _kymmen-_. The -mm-
sequence here points to an earlier *-mp- one. However, what's the
evidence for the supposed prefixal **de- "one"?

> In regards to *dek-, I've been putting my hopes on a Semitic origin,
> seperate from *dekm. Akkadian has a similar word to this, apparently
> meaning "to summon".

Perhaps (Pre-)IE's speakers counted routinely from the left hand to
the right hand. The outstretched right hand would then come to be
connected with the quantity "ten." So maybe the term for "right"
(*deksteros) originally meant "right-hand side" or "right-hand of the
two" (**deks-ter-o-s).

> I continue to maintain that mesolithic and even paleolithic people
> could indeed have number systems up to ten, especially in trade-
> intensive areas. It's an antiquated belief that a number system can
> only be used by "civilized" peoples and not by long-ago herders and
> hunter-gatherers to boot. It's a large waste of time to obsess over
> etymologizing all the numbers reconstructed in IE into cute,
> mentally challenged phrases as if early peoples were hairy
> chimpanzees foraging in the wilderness without any capability of
> language. It's just not the case and archaeology has been proving
> that they were much more developped than this for decades now. So
> why do we still hold on to this silly notion that *dekm MUST come
> from some elemental root instead of... from an older numeral?

Ultimately, all numerals come from body-counting terms. But the
origins for many of these are buried in prehistory.

- Rob