Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 13:14:14 -0400 (EDT) From: cjc26@cornell.edu To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.1020522125123.29827A-100000@travelers.mail.cornell.edu> In-Reply-To: <20020522115950.D47352@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Wed, 22 May 2002, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> Interesting. I had a look at the latin numbers, and they're really
> strikingly similar to Sanskrit,
Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
Proto-Indo-European.
> with the notable exception of "one"
> ("eka" in Sanskrit, which doesn't seem similar to any Western
> language). Also take "twenty" -- "vimshati" in Sanskrit, very
> similar to "viginti" in Latin or "vingt" in French, but quite
> different from the English and German words. (In fact many other
> English and German numbers -- four, five, hundred, thousand -- seem to
> have very little resemblance to Latin or Greek, whereas their French
> equivalents clearly come from Latin and are often similar to
> Sanskrit.)
I think "five" and "hundred" can be explained by Grimm's Law[1] -- /p/,
/t/, /k/ in PIE usually became /f/, /th/, /h/ in Proto-Germanic, while PIE
/b/, /d/, /g/ became Germanic /p/, /t/, /k/. If anyone's curious, here
are the numbers in PIE from one to ten (from Robert Beekes' book
"Comparative Indo-European Linguistics") (and sorry about leaving off all
the accents that I can't type):
PIE Sanskrit Greek Latin Gothic
1 Hoi(H)nos ekas heis unus ains
2 duoh1 dva(u) duo duo twai
3 treies trayas treis tres threis
4 kwetuor catvaras tessares quattuor fidwor
5 penkwe panca pente quinque fimf
6 (s)ueks sas hex sex saihs
7 septm sapta hepta septem sibun
8 h3ekteh3 asta(u) okto octo ahtau
9 (h1)neun nava ennea novem niun
10 dekmt dasha deka decem taihun
20 duidkmti vimshati eikosi viginti twai tigjus
[1] Yes, the same Grimm who published all those fairy tales.
--
Cliff Crawford :: cjc26 at cornell dot edu
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