"six" and "seven" Mediterranean

[Stephane Goyette]

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

>> but surely there's more
>> than just chance resemblance between the numeral names for "6"
>> and "7" as found all over the Mediterranean:

>> Egyptian:       sjsw (*sds-)            sfxw (*sp'3-)
>> Berber:         sd.is                   sa (*sab-)
>> Akkadian:       s^is^s^et (*s^id_s^-)   sebet (*sab3-)
>> Indo-European:  swek^s ~ s^wek^s        sep(h3)tm
>> Georgian:       ekwsi                   s^vidi
>> Etruscan:       s^a                     semph
>> Basque:         sei (*s^ei)             zazpi (*sasbi)

> These are language families which for the most part are
> thought to be unrelated or unrelatable, except for the first
> three which are parts of Afro-Asiatic.

It is perhaps pertinent to note, in connection to the Indo-European forms,
that Andre Martinet (DES STEPPES AUX OCEANS, p.20) pointed out that the
total absence, in the Indo-European numerals, of any aspirate consonant
was extremely odd, considering how frequent such consonants otherwise
were, and suggested this might indicate that the Indo-European numerals
had been borrowed from some language without aspirate consonants.

Stephane Goyette,
University of Ottawa.
stephane at Goyette.com