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Message from discussion Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c))
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cjc26  
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 More options May 22 2002, 1:27 pm
Newsgroups: lucky.freebsd.chat
From: cj...@cornell.edu
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 17:27:03 +0000 (UTC)
Local: Wed, May 22 2002 1:27 pm
Subject: Re: Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c))
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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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