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  • Germanische Zahlwörter: Sprach- und kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen insbesondere zur Zahl 12 by Georg Schuppener
  • Eugenio R. Luján
Germanische Zahlwörter: Sprach- und kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen insbesondere zur Zahl 12. By Georg Schuppener. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1996. Pp. 178.

The number of books dealing with numerals has been steadily increasing in the last years—a sign of a growing interest in a subsystem generally neglected in the mainstream of linguistic literature. Schuppener has had the courage to cover in this book—originating from his doctoral dissertation at Leipzig—almost every controversial point concerning Germanic numerals. In its eighteen chapters (plus a foreword and a conclusion) traditional problems for historical Germanic and Indo-European linguistics, such as the formation of numerals 11 and 12, the long hundred or the break after 60 in some Germanic languages, are discussed.

In the foreword (10) S explains that his main interest does not lie in discussing minor evolutionary details of particular numerals but in the analysis of the underlying structures—a standpoint we should welcome, for there is still much work to be done in the search for appropriate general frames to explain change in numeral systems. There follow two introductory chapters (11–24) devoted to general questions concerning the study of numerals, in which the different methodological approaches to numerals and the question what a numeral is are addressed. The background of the Indo-European system of numerals against which Germanic numerals must be analyzed is also reviewed (25–31). He concludes with the quite traditional remark that the Indo-European system of numerals was consistently decimal, thus overlooking that the decimal structure was a point of arrival of a long process which might have not been concluded in the protolanguage (see, among others, Carol F. Justus, ‘Indo-European numerals and numeral systems’. A linguistic happening in memory of Ben Schwartz, ed. by Yoël L. Arbeitman, 521–41. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters; Eugenio R. Luján, ‘The Indo-European system of numerals from ‘1’ to ‘10’. Numeral types and changes worldwide, ed. by Jadranka Gvozdanović, 199–219. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999.)

As for the following chapters, the subtitle of the book reveals that S has chosen to focus on 12 as the central subject to organize his book. As it is known, 12 stands at a very peculiar position inside the system of numerals of the old Germanic languages. It is the highest numeral—excepting bases—to have simple lexical expression, and its etymology, as traditionally established, goes back to a phrase meaning ‘two left’, just like 11 must have originally meant ‘one left’. S has not challenged this well-founded etymology but has tried to pursue every connection 12 may have inside the system of numerals in order to shed light on why 12 was so built and what its status inside that system really was. S (33) has rightly insisted that the etymology of 11 and 12 implicitly involves a reference to 10, but I do not agree that it follows that a decimal system already existed—it depends on what we call a decimal system, for the etymology only suggests that the mathematical operation of addition was used with 10 as referent, but not necessarily multiplication. (For the distinction between proper and improper base and the application of this principle to Germanic and Lithuanian teens see Eugenio R. Luján, ‘Towards a typology of change in numeral systems’. Language change and typological variation, Vol. 1, ed. by Edgar C. Polomé and Carol F. Justus, 183–200. Washington: Institute for the Study of Man, 1999.)

S also insists on the need to explain why the break was after 12 and not elsewhere, but the explanation he develops (37–57) is rather unconvincing—according to him it would be a relic of the phase of ‘elementary counting’ in which only ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘many’ exist. First, generalizing a phase of ‘elementary counting’ to all the peoples on the earth is arbitrary, in spite of the evidence he offers (for the distribution of different types of counting practices see A. Seidenberg, ‘The diffusion of counting practices’, University of California Publications in Mathematics 3.215–300, 1960). Second...

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