The Number Concept: Its Origin and DevelopmentConant, Levi L. (Levi Leonard)
History
The Number Concept: Its Origin and Development
Conant, Levi L. (Levi Leonard)
Number concept
The foregoing examples will show with considerable fulness the wide
dispersion of the quinary scale. Every part of the world contributes its
share except Europe, where the only exceptions to the universal use of the
decimal system are the half-dozen languages, which still linger on its
confines, whose number base is the vigesimal. Not only is there no living
European tongue possessing a quinary number system, but no trace of this
method of counting is found in any of the numerals of the earlier forms of
speech, which have now become obsolete. The only possible exceptions of
which I can think are the Greek [Greek: pempazein], to count by fives, and
a few kindred words which certainly do hint at a remote antiquity in which
the ancestors of the Greeks counted on their fingers, and so grouped their
units into fives. The Roman notation, the familiar I., II., III., IV.
(originally IIII.), V., VI., etc., with equal certainty suggests quinary
counting, but the Latin language contains no vestige of anything of the
kind, and the whole range of Latin literature is silent on this point,
though it contains numerous references to finger counting. It is quite
within the bounds of possibility that the prehistoric nations of Europe
possessed and used a quinary numeration. But of these races the modern
world knows nothing save the few scanty facts that can be gathered from the
stone implements which have now and then been brought to light. Their
languages have perished as utterly as have the races themselves, and
speculation concerning them is useless. Whatever their form of numeration
may have been, it has left no perceptible trace on the languages by which
they were succeeded. Even the languages of northern and central Europe
which were contemporary with the Greek and Latin of classical times have,
with the exception of the Celtic tongues of the extreme North-west, left
behind them but meagre traces for the modern student to work on. We presume
that the ancient Gauls and Goths, Huns and Scythians, and other barbarian
tribes had the same method of numeration that their descendants now have;
and it is a matter of certainty that the decimal scale was, at that time,
not used with the universality which now obtains; but wherever the decimal
was not used, the universal method was vigesimal; and that the quinary ever
had anything of a foothold in Europe is only to be guessed from its
presence to-day in almost all of the other corners of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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