Archive for Numbers

Xiongnu Official Title Danghu and Jurchen Tanggu ‘Hundred’

[This is a guest post by Penglin Wang]

            Identification of the Xiongnu word ninghu (寧胡) as meaning ‘six’ in the phrase ninghu yanshi ‘the sixth consort’ (Wang 2024) and its connection with Jurchen ninggu (寧谷) and Manchu ninggun ‘six’ has opened up the possibility for thinking about the Xiongnu official title danghu (當戶) in relation to Jurchen tanggu (倘古) and Manchu tanggū ‘hundred’. Xiongnu used gradient decimal numerals as the echelons for its military and administrative organization, in which a century stands between a decad tier and a chiliad tier and is commanded by a centurion. Presumably, the centurion was gradually generalized as an official in addition to their regular low-ranking position and hence promoted to a mid and mid-high rank bearing the prefix da (大) ‘grand’.

            Chinese records may serve to illustrate where the Xiongnu official titles grand danghu and danghu fit in the government system. According to Shiji (110.2890f), there are wise kings of the left and right, guli (谷蠡) kings of the left and right, grand generals of the left and right, grand commandants of the left and right, grand danghu of the left and right, and gudu (骨都) marquises of the left and right; From wise kings of the left and right down to danghu, the big one is ten thousand horsemen, the small ones are several chiliads; All the twenty-four chiefs have their own chiliad chiefs, century chiefs, decad chiefs, small kings, ministers, commandants, danghu, qiequ (且渠) and the like. Having paid attention to the title danghu used in Hanshu, the ancient commentators such as Yan Shigu (顏師古 581-645, Hanshu 8.266, 17.650) and Meng Kang (孟康 Hanshu 8.271) living in the third century were united in their opinion that danghu and danghu of the left and right were Xiongnu official titles.

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Number taboos in a Chinese elevator

This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis:

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The Sinitic Word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin, part 2

[This is a guest post by Liam Kelley.]

Looking up "triệu" in this Nom dictionary brings up an example from a line in a work that appears to date from the early twentieth century that states: "The soul of the 4,000-year-old country has yet to awaken. The 25 million [triệu兆 ] people are still deep in slumber."

There was definitely modern Mandarin terminology that entered classical Chinese in Vietnam at that time (I haven't looked at many Nom texts from that period so I can't say about Mandarin terms in the spoken language, but it would make sense that some would be there too), and the topic here (soul of a country/nation, awakening from sleep) is the type of new nationalist concepts that spread from Japan/China to Vietnam at that time.

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The Sinitic Word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling about the Sinitic word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin in general, and Indonesian Mandarin in particular.]

I recently had a conversation with a Mandarin-speaking Chinese-Indonesian friend who used the word 條 tiáo to mean "million" (as in 1 000 000) in the place of the more universal 百萬 bǎiwàn. After asking our other Southeast Asian Mandarin-speaking (mostly Singaporean and Malaysian) friends, we found that none of them have ever said 條 tiáo for "million" — all of them say 百萬 bǎiwàn.

Now I know for a fact that Indonesian Hokkien has a similar-sounding word for "million" — 兆 tiāu/tiǎu (Wiktionary says the first reading is more common in Xiamen/Amoy and Zhangzhou/Changchiu while the second is more common in Quanzhou/Chinchiu). This use of 兆 for "million" is also recorded in 華夷通語 Huâ–Î Thong-gú, an 1883 (Kangxi 9) dictionary by a Chinese-Malay translator named 林衡南 Lim Heng-nam (image available upon request), glossed as 寔撈突轆沙 sit-la-tut lak-sa (Malay: seratus laksa — "laksa" is obviously from Sanskrit; modern Malay no longer uses myriads, but millions "juta". Note also that the circle under 轆 on the image signifies a vernacular reading, that is lak, rather than the literary reading lok).

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"Forty" in Indo-European and Turkic

Mehmet Oguz Derin writes:

Recently, while reinspecting the numerals, I found that the case of forty in Turkic is a bit more challenging (kırk/qwrq). It made me wonder, could this possibly be a very early borrowing from Indo-European, from the same stem that produces the quaranta word with the same meaning? Maybe the base got in with the kır- part as somehow verbalized and then nominalized again within the framework of language family using -k coda, or directly from a nominal functioning base. Or would that be a too-far-fetched idea to think?

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Heavy Velar vs Meager Bilabial Articulations in Xiongnu Language

[This is a guest post by Penglin Wang]

            The great difficulties we have with trying to study Xiongnu language persist from trying to glean Xiongnu words, especially the glossed ones, in early Chinese sources for comparison in order to know what linguistic affiliation it seems to have in the central Eurasian region. Since these difficulties cannot be overcome at all owing to its extinct status a millennium plus ago, an alternative approach could be to recognize that there are different components of language regardless of living or extinct and attempt to observe how different components can differ from one another yet still be entities that most researchers would want to treat as linguistic data or facts rather than imaginations for a comparative purpose. It could then be possible to open up a window to contribute to a solution of some classic problems in Altaic comparative studies. One such attempt is to examine the available Xiongnu words from the perspectives of articulatory phonetics and phonotactics. Concern for these is characteristic of Xiongnu studies. Pulleyblank (1962:242) has insightfully observed “only *b- initially, never *p-” in the Xiongnu transcriptions.

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Miao / Hmong

From Bob Ramsey:


Ethnic Miao girls in traditional Miao costumes–in Sichuan, China

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Toddler writes numerals

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Odevity or parity

[This is a guest post by Jeffrey Shallit]

A Chinese student here at Waterloo used the term "odevity" for what English-speaking computer scientists typically call "parity" — the property of an integer being odd or even.

I had never heard this term before, so I used Google Scholar to look at where it is being used.  It is used almost exclusively by Chinese engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists.  The first usage I was able to find with Google Book Search was in 1972, obtained with this search.

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Tocharian, Turkic, and Old Sinitic "ten thousand"

Serious problem here.

Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish, p. 507b:

F tümen properly ‘ten thousand’, but often used for ‘an indefinitely large number’; immediately borrowed from Tokharian, where the forms are A tmān; B tmane, tumane, but Prof. Pulleyblank has told me orally that he thinks this word may have been borrowed in its turn fr. a Proto-Chinese form *tman, or the like, of wan ‘ten thousand’ (Giles 12,486).

Source (pdf)

[VHM:  the "F" at the beginning of the entry means "Foreign loanword"]

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Why Chinese write "9" backwards

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Hebrew mystery

[This is a guest post by Adam Levine]

A friend noticed this plaque while attending a wedding in New England:

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The temperature is struggling

I commented back in 2008 on the ridiculous vagueness of some of the brief weather forecast summaries on BBC radio ("pretty miserable by and large," and so on). I do sometimes miss the calm, scientific character of American weather forecasts, with their precise temperature range predictions and exact precipitation probabilities. In recent days, on BBC Radio 4's morning news magazine program, I have heard an official meteorologist guy from the weather center saying not just vague things like "a weather front trying to get in from the north Atlantic," or "heading for something a little bit warmer as we move toward the weekend," but (more than once) a total baffler: "The temperature is going to be struggling." What the hell is that about?

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