Art. VIII.—Etymology of the Turkish Numerals

Extract

The Etymology of Numerals, or the question what primary ideas originally furnished the names for the different numbers, is a matter of considerable obscurity and uncertainty in many languages. Professor Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar of the Sanscritic Languages, translated into English by Lieutenant Eastwick, says, in vol. i. p. 427: “I do not think that any language whatever has produced special original words for the particular designation of such compacted and peculiar ideas as three, four, five, etc.; and as the appellations of numbers resist all comparison with the verbal bases, the pronominal bases remain the only means by which to explain them.” To whatever extent this may be true respecting the Sanscritic languages, it does not apply to many others spoken in Africa and America; and from these some light may possibly be derived for the elucidation of the former. Even in Asia there is the extensive stock of Tartar languages, to which also the Turkish or Osmanli belongs, where the roots of words occupy so dominant a position, and can, with their primary meaning, be still so easily traced, that in regard to them the very reverse holds good of what Professor Bopp affirmed about the absence of connexion with verbal bases in the Sanscritic Numerals. Only so much is true, that also in the Tartar languages the Numerals were originally not designations for the abstract idea of numeric order, but expressions, still capable of being understood, to mark certain peculiarities of the fingers, with whose help people used to count.From being at first ordinary appellatives, they gradually passed into Numerals, or mere symbolic representations of numbers, when their primary signification faded away from the people's mind.