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Once, twice, thrice... ? (non-EO)

de ceigered, 2011-januaro-02

Mesaĝoj: 6

Lingvo: English

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2011-januaro-02 12:48:28

Off topic, but I was wondering about once, twice, thrice, etc, and how this would continue in previous versions of English before we just got lazy and stopped at thrice, or even twice (regularity? Bah! a word ain't valid unless it's completely unrelated in form to anything even remotely similar in meaning!). Anyone any ideas? I know that it roughly went "ānes, twies, thriges" in Old English, but there doesn't seem to be any etymological evidence of any other numbers.

I'd like to think that the historically English was half as creative as Esperanto before we just started using "times" lango.gif

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2011-januaro-02 13:48:27

Many languages treat one, two, and three as special numbers, since we encounter them so much in our daily life. Some languages limit the "special" status to one and two only, and some only to one.

I doubt that the sequence of once, twice, thrice *ever* extended beyond the number three.

You will also notice that in ordinal numbers, everything is more regular after three. FirST, secoND, thiRD, fourTH, fifTH, sixTH, etc.

For an example in another language, in Latin, the numbers one, two, and three get "special treatment" in the sense that they have masculine, feminine, and neuter forms; other numbers (until you reach the hundreds at least) don't vary according to gender.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2011-januaro-02 13:59:39

Thanks Erinja for that reply!

I guess my thick head didn't really let me see the significance of "first second third fourTH", because I always went "well, the -d in "third" and the -th in the rest are just mutations of eachother, and second is a loanword, and first is related to proto- etc et al", but it seems like perhaps the human mind really doesn't seem to think past a certain amount of numbers - I had always suspected that numbers past 5 were unnatural to humans, but the fact that many languages have base10 and used to even have base20 schemes confused me.

So now thanks to your post I can sort of put that knowledge all together now which I otherwise would have just taken for granted and not seen the pattern lango.gif.

This now also reminds me of the saying "two company, three's a crowd", which I certainly feel, since (in Eo terms), anything over a certain number I just see as being an "arego" rather than the individual objects themselves...

Roberto12 (Montri la profilon) 2011-januaro-02 19:23:05

I'm delighted to be able to post the fource message in this thread lango.gif

sudanglo (Montri la profilon) 2011-januaro-02 20:34:26

How about primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary?

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2011-januaro-03 04:30:42

sudanglo:How about primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary?
Ah, now that's one thing I was trying to remember - although having only up to tertiary education doesn't really help jog the memory of everything above that!
So that goes quinary, senary etc I'm guessing.

Speaking of which, Quinary on Wikipedia gives an interesting article about base-5 number systems - it seems a lot more common than I had thought! I suspect there's a correlation between that and how many fingers/toes we have on each limb (and dogs also seem to be able to count up to 3/4 naturally, which also has a correlation with the amount of easily accessible sets of phalanges)

Roberto12:I'm delighted to be able to post the fource message in this thread
I'm... sixce? shoko.gif

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