Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
When we learn to count, we rattle off the first ten numbers as a set of arbitrary sounds as if they were proper names and have no other meaning. After “ten,” in most languages, we might notice that the number names are constructed out of the first ten. In Ancient Greek hen is “one” and deka is “ten,” so “eleven” is hendeka; “twelve” is dodeka. So in Latin “eleven” is undecim, “twelve” is duodecim, and so on. This system is still fairly clear in the descendants of Latin: French onze and douze, Spanish once and doce, and so on. In English it is less clear: Where do “eleven” and “twelve” come from? “Twelve” looks like it has “two” in it, and the l-v pattern is found in both words. The first syllable of “eleven,” it turns out, comes from an old form of “one,” as is clear in other Germanic languages, such as Old High German einlif. The second half of both words might come from an old form of “leave” or “left,” in which case the words might mean something like “ten and one (or two) left over,” though this is far from certain.
In any case, after “twelve” it is clear sailing: “thirteen” is “three+ten,” “fourteen” is “four+ten,” “twenty” is “two tens,” “thirty” is “three tens,” and so on. Only at “hundred” do we find something new, and then at “thousand”; we’ll return to them.
Can we see any patterns in the first ten numbers? It may have struck us as children that “four” and “five” begin with f, and that “six” and “seven” begin with s, but that’s not much to go on. If we reconstruct the numbers in our ancestral mother language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), however, certain patterns seem to emerge. “Two” corresponds to Greek duo, Latin duo, Irish do, and other forms that imply that the oldest reconstructible form was something like dwo. “Eight” corresponds to Greek okto, Latin octo, Old High German ahto, and other forms that suggest PIE okto. Now many ancient languages in this family had not only singular and plural nouns but duals, and a frequent dual ending was -o. It makes sense that the word for “two” would have a dual ending, but perhaps “eight” did also: it meant two of something. Perhaps the something was the word for “palm,” for it is intriguing that the Avestan word ashti means “four fingers’ breadth” or “palm.” So “eight” would have meant “two palms” or “two hands, not counting thumbs.” Maybe.
“Four” takes very different shapes in our kindred languages. In Latin it is quattuor, in Greek tettares or tessares (but in some dialects the forms begin with p-), in Sanskrit catvaras, in Welsh pedwar, and in Gothic (closest to English) fidwar. There is evidently a tendency for words beginning with qu- (or kw-) to switch to p-, which is what would happen if you closed your lips altogether while making the w-sound. There was also a tendency for words beginning with p- to become f- in the Germanic languages, such as pater and “father.” So after some debate linguists have reconstructed PIE “four” as kwetwor.
“Five” is also complicated. In Latin it is quinque, in Greek pente, in Sanskrit panca, in Old Welsh pimp, in Old High German finf. It looks as if the shift from kw- to p- was happening here too, but something else was afoot. Linguists reconstruct PIE penkwe, but some families assimilated the p- to kw- (as in quinque and Old Irish coic) while others assimilated kw- to p- (as in pimp and a Greek dialect pempe). We should remember that number words are often said rapidly as items are counted off, and speed plus frequent repetition would encourage these assimilations.
At any rate, we have PIE kwetwor and penkwe. They share a syllable, which looks identical to Latin –que, which means “and” and attaches to the end of a word, as in Senatus Populusque Romanus, “Roman Senate and People.” Penkwe makes sense as the last word of a set of five, as you count on one hand “one, two, three, four, and-five.” Kwetwor is a little more puzzling, but we can imagine a “palm” or four fingers making a set as well. Maybe pen by itself ment “hand” and twor meant, well, who knows? This is all highly speculative.
“Hundred,” or rather the “hund” part, is reconstructed as something like kmtom, with a minimal vowel in the first syllable. Some think that it comes from the word for “ten” (dekmt) twice: dekmt-dekmt with the de- syllables left out. It’s plausible, but hard to prove. The first part of “thousand” seems derive from a PIE word meaning “strong,” but there is no consensus among etymologists about the second part. It is tempting to see “hund” in it, which would make “thousand” mean “strong hundred,” but that may be entirely mistaken.
We take for granted that number words, like written numeral systems, are based on ten, since we have ten fingers, and indeed almost everywhere we look in the world we find the decimal system, or base-ten system. It’s not an accident that “digit” means both finger and one of the ten written numbers from zero to nine. But other numbers lurk within the system. The Romans had a symbol for five (V) and fifty (L) as well as ten (X) and hundred (C). The “score” (twenty) is not just decorative or poetic, as in “four score and seven years ago.” People counted by scores, they kept score, as it were, by “scoring” or “notching” wood or paper. It shows up in the peculiar French word for “eighty”: quatre-vingts or “four twenties.” (“Seventy is odd as well: soixante-dix or “sixty ten”; “ninety” is quatre-vingt-dix “or “four twenty ten.”) One Welsh way to say “seventy-nine” is pedwar ugain namyn un, which means “four twenties less one.”
We are so used to the decimal system that it seems natural and inevitable, and of course it is indeed natural, since nature gave us ten fingers. It’s too bad, though, that nature didn’t give us twelve fingers, for if it had we would have a base-12 number system. It would be better than our base-10 system, because 10 is evenly divisible only by 2 and 5, while 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
Let me conclude by noting the possible presence of some alien numbers in English, disguised as nonsense syllables. “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,” used in counting-out routines, may well go back to Welsh or Cumbric (now extinct) for “one, two, three, four.” This is far from certain, in part because there are so many variants of the funny words. But “hickory, dickory, dock” looks a lot like “eight, nine, ten” in Cumbric: hevera, devera, dick. Dick certainly resembles Greek deka and Latin decem. In Cumberland, perhaps, after the language was displaced by English, men still counted a score of sheep, and women counted a score of stitches, in Cumbric words. Children heard them, used them in their games and songs, and passed them on to children in England. I think this is probably true, but I wouldn’t count on it.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.