Harald:
> Quite often the have fingercounting which ranges up to 5, 10 or 20.
> Extremely seldom, if at all, are there monomorphemic numerals up to
> exactly 6.
I think this is an incorrect way of thinking about language. If you
really wrap your head around what it would be like to draw out a
linguistic map of languages during the neolithic, you'd realize that
you'd end up with a pattern like a continuum where there aren't any
hard edges. What does that have to do with anything? Well, if you take
one dialect of a particular language, they may indeed have numbers up
to "ten". You take another dialect and they may also have numbers up
to "ten".
But what if the two dialects of that language have different number
sets? What if the higher numbers differ in the two dialects? This is
what we'd expect since higher numbers would tend to be replaced more
often than lower ones, particularly in a neolithic environment where
we have nothing but hunter-gatherer bands roaming the wilderness for
good hunting grounds. All the speakers of a particular language
aren't going to band together, have a meeting and decide how to say
'eight' but that doesn't mean that they didn't have their own local
word.
So, now let's expand this thought experiment.
What if the two dialects both contribute to the development of a
proto-language that us modernday people are trying to reconstruct?
We all should know by now that proto-languages are abstract
representations of the real language. The _real_ protolanguage, such
as the 'real IE', would not have been a single, homogeneous language.
Rather, the true protolanguage would be a collection of interrelated
dialects all contributing to form what we call things like 'Proto-IE'
or 'Proto-Uralic'.
Now, back to Uralic itself. Understanding the above fully means that
we understand that Uralic is not a single language and never was. It's
a conglomeration of dialects, ever merging, fracturing and remerging.
One can still have number systems from one to ten in these neolithic
languages without them ever being reconstructable in the artificial
construct we call 'protolanguage' simply because there may not have
been consensus amongst the neighbouring dialects on what 'seven',
'eight', 'nine' or 'ten' should be.
= gLeN
open your mind