Teens and Twenties

[Richard Parker]

The 'digital - quintal - decimal - vigesimal' progression in 
  numbering systems referred to by many linguists doesn't 
  actually apply to what seems to have evolved in the real 
  world. 
   
  So we might as well dump those terms.
   
  The progress seems to have been:
  1,2 many
  1,2, then 5 = 1 hand (fill in the blanks with something)
  1,2,3,4,5 then hand +1,+2 etc to ten = 2 hands, then start on 
  the toes. When you get to 20 fingers and toes it's 'one man 
  finish'. So 40 is 'two men finish'.
   
  Then, you either go on, like many New Guinea groups, to count 
  bits from one hand and up the arm, round the head, and down 
  the other side to finish with the other hand
  or 
  You stop referring directly to parts of the body (like bending 
  down to point at your toes as you count the teens) and use 
  your two hands alone, face to face. 
  (You don't want to be looking at your toes when you've become 
  a trader and are trying to make a deal). 
  You've just dumped the "vigesimal system".
   
  Lo and behold, you've got a decimal system. By accident.
   
  When you get a bit more sophisticated, you invent new words 
  for 6-9, instead of just first hand +1, first hand +2, etc.
   
  The really big mystery (at least for me) is exactly where 
  those words - *enem, *pitu, *walu and *Siwa, then *puluq
- originated. And another is what they actually mean.
   
  There is a definite line, north of the New Guinea mainland, 
  and wandering through Vanuatu, where those words come out of 
  nowhere and take over. 
   
  I'm just now going through Glen Lean's paper on East New 
  Britain, and find that *enem suddenly appears (as nom, nomdi, 
  nomnain) but, in some languages, 7 is still 5+2. 8=5+3, etc.
   
  The conventional wisdom is that Papuans were taught 'real 
  numbers' by incoming Austronesians, but I find something very 
  similar happening in Taiwan (sorry, Formosa).
   
  And they didn't take over in Borneo, or Malay
See Macassarese: 
6=ennang (ok An), but 7=tudju, 8=sagantudju, 9 is salapang, 
  and 10 is sampulo (ok An) 
   
  It's all very well to suggest that these groups 'innovated' 
  their very basic numbering systems for some cultural reason, 
  but that is unprecedented in other language families, so the 
  Austronesian exceptions should really be given some better 
  explanation for 'departing' from their proto-language 
  conventions.  
   
  In about 300 Indo-European languages, only one still uses the 
  5+1, 5+2, etc progression to 10, and that is Vedda, from the 
  innermost jungles of Sri Lanka. 
   
  Around 200 Austronesian languages still use that system.
   
  Austronesian languages still preserve a wide variety of 
  numbering systems, and this is worth looking at.
   
  regards
   
  Richard
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