What do Welshmen have to do with Polynesians?

 

It’s very difficult to convince Austronesian linguists that An numbers didn’t actually spring, fully-formed, as miraculously decimal systems in proto-Austronesian, or proto-Oceanic, at the latest, 3500 years ago. (It was just as difficult to convince Indo-Europeanists that this didn’t happen, either, but at least they’re coming round, now).

After all, if you collect large sets of cognate words from daughter languages, and then reconstruct them, using the phonetic rules you’ve already found by reconstructing other words, and end up with a very obvious decimal set, from 1-10, you make the most obvious deduction; it must always have been that way. Well, it wasn’t.

 

Vigesimal numbering, at least in the basic stages, occurred worldwide, simply because 20 is the logical end-point to counting first your fingers, and then your toes. At 20, you’ve got a higher unit, so you can memorise it somehow, and start again to count up to 20 again. Now you’ve got two higher units. Remember them, and then do it all over again. At the end, you will have x higher units, and an exact number left over.

At each count of twenty, you simply score a stick, or run your hand down your shepherd’s crook to another readymade score.

Right up to the 20^th century, shepherds around England were using a ‘shepherd’s score’ to count their flocks. The system was adapted from the old Briton, or Brythonic number system, which itself evolved into separate languages (Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish and Breton) when the British were split up and forced west by the rude Anglo-Saxons in the 6^thC AD.

 

Here’s an example of just one of these shepherds’ systems, compared with the old Welsh vigesimal system, that also persevered until the 20^thC

 

Old Shepherds’ Score
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Lincolnshire
yan	tan	tethera	pethera	pimp	sethera	lethera	hovera	covera	dik
Welsh
un	dau, dwy (fem)	tri,tair (fem)	pedwar, pedair (fem)	pump	chwech	saith	wyth	naw	deg
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
Lincolnshire
yan-a-dik	tan-a-dik	tethera-dik	pethera-dik	bumfit	yan-a-bumfit	tan-a-bumfit	tethera-bumfit	pethera-bumfit	figgot
Welsh
un ar ddeg	deuddeg	tair ar ddeg	pedair ar ddeg	pymtheg	un ar bymtheg	dwy ar bymtheg	deunaw	pedair ar bymtheg	ugain

 

So these (almost certainly illiterate) shepherds adopted a counting system from a different language (or kept it, because they were lower-status Brythons left behind) in an interesting way. They didn’t even consider applying the logic inherent in the original system, but used made-up, but memorable, rhyming nonsense words instead.

Also, young mothers started using these rhyming words as lullabies. Hence ‘counting sheep’ to go to sleep. And when they grew older, they used the same tally words to count stitches in knitting. And children still use them in counting out games.

 

But there’s more of interest in the Welsh counting system, and some details that might reveal its real roots.

The counts through from 20 to 100 are very practically based on 20s – vigesimal. From 20 to 40 you go up again to 10 – deg ar hugain- and on, to deugain (2 ugains). But, at 50, the new word is hanner cant (half hundred). So now you’ve got three lots of higher units – 20s, 50s and 100s. With those higher units, you can go a long way; you could count yourself to sleep for a fortnight.

 

Old Welsh vigesimal system
10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100
deg	ugain	deg ar hugain	deugain	hanner cant	trigain	deg a thrigain	pedwar ugain	deg a phedwar ugain	cant (cannoedd)

 

But there are a few other subtle clues in the Welsh counting system to the real history of Celtic systems:.

–          at 15, the count starts again 15+1, 15+2, up to 20. This isn’t unusual; many languages reach the end of counting the first lot of toes, and then start out again with the second lot, ending up with ‘whole man’. What is unusual here is that the first lot of numbers (up to 10) isn’t applied to counting the teens.

–         but then Welsh counting also does something else a bit strange. 18 is deunaw, (two nines) for some strange reason.

–         In Breton, a closely related language (fleeing Brythons doing the very opposite of Dunkirk) 18 is tri w’ech (three sixes).

Why? These may be fossils of an archaic system of counting in threes, not fives.