From owner-freebsd-chat Wed May 22 10:14:24 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from travelers.mail.cornell.edu (travelers.mail.cornell.edu [132.236.56.13]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C332037B409; Wed, 22 May 2002 10:14:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from travelers.mail.cornell.edu (travelers.mail.cornell.edu [132.236.56.13]) by travelers.mail.cornell.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id NAA02424; Wed, 22 May 2002 13:14:14 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 13:14:14 -0400 (EDT) From: cjc26@cornell.edu X-Sender: cjc26@travelers.mail.cornell.edu To: Rahul Siddharthan Cc: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" , Brad Knowles , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) In-Reply-To: <20020522115950.D47352@lpt.ens.fr> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message