Oddities of Math and Language

[plaidviking]

While knitting, I come upon the realization that English has the remnants of Base 12 counting in our words for the numbers. For those of you unfamiliar w/ Base counting, it is essentially the number you count up to before your digit moves over. Now modern mathematics is based on Base 10, often given for the fact that we have 10 digits. Though this

Comments

[3rdragon]

Tonga/Chitonga (South-Central Africa, Bantu language) seems to have five. I can only find up to five in my two books, and at one point my teacher mentioned that Tonga only has words for up to five. (Mind you, I've also been told that you can count to anything you want in Tonga, it's just awkward, which would make sense if it really *is* base five. I'm curious how it's constructed, though.) Upshot of which is that everyone uses English for numbers, even if they only barely speak English otherwise.

And I clearly need to start using the light green Tonga lesson book, which not only has practice sentences like "My goat has aborted" and "My thing is defunct," but also gives both idiomatic and literal translations (Goat of-me it-throw-away and Thing-of-me it-die), which caters to my Yes, but what does it MEAN tendencies. And I'm just as likely to need to say, "My goat has aborted" as "Teacher, my fingers are on my hands" or "We are all farmers," which is what the other book is offering in terms of practice sentences. Although I should point out that "I am not a nurse" is a more useful sentence than one would expect. (Not that I've actually had occasion to use it since I figured out what it was, which is just as well, since I don't remember how to say it.)

[singingdragon]

I couldn't find anything on Tonga specifically. I wonder if it's similar to the Luganda system? Same language family, but I don't know how closely they're related.

Amongst other wacky things, in Luganda 1-5 are adjectives, while higher numbers are nouns. I read through that wikipedia entry trying to work out how, let alone why, the class prefixes shift around in different number ranges, but I gave up. I would definitely say that "you can count to anything you want, it's just awkward" applies here.

[3rdragon]

Just looking at the words, not very, since I only recognize cognates in a few articles and the word for mine (wenge, compared to Tonga wangu. Well, actually -angu, plus a noun-agreement prefix). Uganda is most of two large countries away from here, which is a pretty big distance when it comes to African languages. I'm told that bantu languages are like romance languages, as far as similarities between languages: ranging anywhere from 'you can understand but not speak it' to 'you get a few cognates and a leg up on the grammar.' So perhaps the format of numbers is the same, if not the actual numbers.

I don't know if Tonga 1-5 are adjectives or nouns, since we don't use fancy grammar terms like that around here, but they do need to agree with the thing you're counting, which would suggest adjectives, but mostly I avoid thinking about nouns and classes and such.

[3rdragon]

While looking for something else, I found a Chitonga-English dictionary that does list numbers greater than five:

kamwi one eins
tubili two zwei
tutatu three drei
tune four vier
musanu five fünf
musanu akamwi six sechs
ikumi ten zehn
ikumi amusanu akamwi sixteen sechszehn
makumi obile twenty zwanzig
makumi atatu thirty dreissig
mwanda one hundred einhundet
cuulu one thousand eintausend

The a- prefix means with, so sixteen is literally "ten with five with one."
And ma- is one of the indicators of noun class, I think. You'll note that the -bile root is the same in two and twenty, and the -tatu root in three and thirty. No wonder everybody counts in English, especially considering how terrible most people's arithmetic skills are here.