Numeral Systems of the World's Languages

 

Language is mankind's system of sound symbols. Nature has created many different peoples, each with its own religious, political and cultural framework; each language, no matter how politically important or populous it is, must be treated with respect.
Every race has the right to preserve its own language and culture, which should also be respected by others. In other words, each people is entitled to its own complete history, both material and spiritual. Of course, no one wants to see a language and its culture disappear from the face of the earth, leaving future generations ignorant of its history and existence. Even less does anyone have the right to stop others from speaking their mother tongue. Due to political and economical pressures, and other factors, in the past half of century, hundreds of minority languages in the world are in danger of extinction.
The former SSILA President, Prof.Michael Krauss says "Languages no longer being learned as mother-tongues by children are beyond endangerment... Unless the current course is reversed, these languages are doomed to extinction, like species lacking reproductive capacity, Should we mourn the loss of Eyak or Ubykh any less than the loss of the panda or California condor?... We should all care about this, otherwise the world will be less interesting, less beautiful."
Some linguists predict that half of the world's languages will probably become extinct during the next century.
The existing 6,000 or so languages in the world are a common cultural treasure of human beings. In order to preserve global linguistic diversity, the United Nations set 1992 as "the Year of Endangered Languages". Urgent actions to rescue and document the endangered languages have been undertaken by some countries these few years.
The surviving thousands of the world's ethnic groups using a variety of different numeral systems: duodecimal systems, decimal systems, quinary systems, quartary systems, tertiary systems, binary systems, incomplete decimal systems, mixed systems, body-parts tally systems and so on. Certain South American indigenous languages even only distinguish the numbers "one" and "many". These fascinating phenomena, like a Kaleidoscope, reflect the different evolutionary steps of human counting concepts.
Needless to say, these invaluable linguistic data should also be documented as soon as possible, as the indigenous numeral systems of minority ethnic groups are particularly prone to be replaced by neighbouring politically and economically predominant languages. The younger generations tend to give up the traditional numeral systems and adopt the borrowed ones; this phenomenon is especially prevalent in Melanesia, South and South-East Asia, Central and South America and certain areas of Africa.
The principal purpose of this web site is to document the various numeral systems adopted by the currently existing 5,000 to 6,000 human languages, focusing especially on those little-known, undescribed and endangered languages, to record and preserve the traditional counting systems before they indeed pass into history.
Research on numeral systems is not only a very interesting topic but also an academically valuable reference resource to those involved in the academic disciplines of Linguistics, Anthropology, Ethnology, History and Philosophy of Mathematics.
The author of this project is especially interested in the genetic classifications, phonological systems and counting concepts of human languages, and has spent over fifteen years recording and analyzing the numeral systems of the World's languages, and so far has successfully collected basic numeral systems and data from about 4,000 languages in the world. Most of the data were kindly provided by linguists including members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the Bible translators of New Tribes Mission and other missionary organizations, and linguists, anthropologists and related scholars working on their respective fields. The majority of the data were written in standard IPA symbols or phonemic transcriptions.

Language Families in Europe and Asia

Language Families in the Pacific

Language Families in Africa

Language Families in North and Central America

Language Families in South America

Acknowledgements and Sources

Useful Links

    This site is under re-construction and better viewed by IE 5.0  

Displaying data typed in IPA symbols on the World Wide Web is a historic problem. However, if you download the SIL Encore IPA93 fonts and install them in your computer, you would be able to see the accurate numeral systems typed in IPA symbols from certain selected language samples.
Click on the website: http://www.sil.org/Computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html  to download the SIL Encore IPA93 fonts (about 4 mins).
The numeral samples in HTML format on this site will be changed into GIF format in the near future

This project is in need of collaboration and assistance from
interested linguists around the world.
It is hoped to publish the data in CD-ROM form
Any offers for collobaration and/or financial support for
this project will be welcome:
please contact eugeneslchan@ctimail3.com  


All material copyright 1998-2001 by Eugene S.L.Chan
Site created 8 December 1998,  Last updated 21 February, 2002

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