The first thing I do when I’m in the shower is toe-touching. It keeps me flexible (from the Latin “flexibilis,” based on the verb “flectere,” to bend; “flectere” also means to alter — consider our words deflect, reflect, inflect).
Stretching my arms down, I count in one of the languages I know best — English, German and Italian. Recently, I started to wonder why some words for numbers seem similar and others unrelated.
To my amazement, in spite of their apparent differences, the English, German and Italian numerals one to 10 (whether or not cognate with Latin or Greek) ultimately share the same Proto-Indo-European root.
It’s easy to imagine that when people started counting, no matter where in the world they lived or how they spoke, they would count on the fingers of their two hands.
Thanks to our anatomy, 10 was a common unit. But when people counted beyond 10, the words sometimes followed a different pattern.
The ancient Romans were precise and logical — 11 was expressed as one and 10 (“undecim,” which became the Italian “undici”); 12 was two and 10 (“duodecim,” “dodici” in Italian). However, the English 11, 12 (as also the German “elf,” “zwölf”) can be traced back to a compound of Germanic origin meaning literally one (or two) left over 10.
Counting resumed what we’d call logic at 13 when the suffix ‘teen’, the Old English form of 10, was attached to the numerals up to 19 (in German the suffix was “zehn,” meaning 10, as in “dreizehn,” etc.).
For 20, 30, 40, and so on, English added the suffix “ty” (from the Old English “tig”, denoting a group of 10; German did similar, adding the suffix “zig”).
Centuries ago, before there were fast and standardized ways for keeping track of large quantities, people had words for sets or groups of numbers. Score, for example, referred to 20, from the Old English “scoru,” which in turn derives from Old Norse “skor,” meaning notch. Notches cut in a piece of wood (known as a tally) were grouped in sets of 20, and score eventually came to signify the number 20.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address of 1863 famously began “Four score and seven years ago,” referring to the Declaration of Independence (1776) of 87 years previously. Colloquially, we still say a score of times to mean often.
Numbers grouped in sets of 12 were also convenient. There probably isn’t a day when we don’t use the word dozen, which has its root in the Latin “duodecim,” 12.
And a gross, that is 144 (a dozen dozen), comes from the Old French “grosse douzaine,” large dozen.
The British Isles once had an entire vocabulary for counting sheep, with some variations from region to region. Shepherds would do head counts in units of 20, or scores, but they also had individual terms for the numbers from one to 20 -— of which the most memorable (I thought) was the word for 15, bumfit.
Now, in the shower, when I feel confident, I toe-touch a score of times. When I feel sheepish, I stop at bumfit.
Sabine Eiche is a writer and art historian.
