From: Harald Hammarström Message: 34081 Date: 2004-09-08
> Ultimately, all numerals come from body-counting terms. But the
> origins for many of these are buried in prehistory.
This is a silly assertion - many high or semi-high numerals come from
nouns like group, bundle or the like or are participles that have no
body-part-morpheme in them. For at least 95% of the lower
numerals in the world's languages, we don't know their etymology so we
don't know if they come from body-counting or not.
Harald
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