Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of
attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to
stones and manufactured articles.
This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body or
of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest
illustrations in poetry,[B] where it may be held to represent less the
elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive
tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process
belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to
utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of
self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of
words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of
the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for
"two" certain syllables (_ny_ and _ceul_) which originally mean
"ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same
sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (_Schock_) signifies
sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The
Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ
the word _mettens_, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same
people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the
practice of designating thirty by the word _kahlis_, meaning "cord."
The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the word _chuncu_,
"heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verb
_chaba_, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction."
So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five,"
"two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty.
A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight
needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger,
the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot--the extended
arms, as in the ancient _orgya_, and the extended legs, as in the
modern yard--have all played a fundamental part in determining the
standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the
[Greek: gyê], the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in
one day; the _stade_, the distance which a good runner could traverse
without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old
division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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