Before closing this altogether inadequate sketch of a vast and
intricate subject, I would say just one word about the expression of
ideas of number. It is quite a mistake to suppose that savages have
no sense of number, because the simple-minded European traveller,
compiling a short vocabulary in the usual way, can get no equivalent
for our numerals, say from 5 to 10. The fact is that the numerical
interest has taken a different turn, incorporating itself with other
interests of a more concrete kind in linguistic forms to which our
own type of language affords no key at all. Thus in the island of Kiwai,
at the mouth of the Fly River in New Guinea, the Cambridge Expedition
found a whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the number of subjects
acting on the number of objects at a given moment could be concretely
specified. To indicate the action of two on many in the past, they
said _rudo_, in the present _durudo_; of many on many in the past _rumo_,
in the present _durumo_; of two on two in the past, _amarudo_, in the
present _amadurudo_; of many on two in the past _amarumo_; of many
on three in the past _ibidurumo_, of many on three in the present
_ibidurudo_; of three on two in the present, _amabidurumo_, of three
on two in the past, _amabirumo_, and so on. Meanwhile, words to serve
the purpose of pure counting are all the scarcer because hands and
feet supply in themselves an excellent means not only of calculating,
but likewise of communicating, a number. It is the one case in which
gesture-language can claim something like an independent status by
the side of speech.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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