The deep history of the number words.

ABSTRACT: We have previously shown that the 'low limit' number words (from one to five) have exceptionally slow rates of lexical replacement when measured across the Indo-European (IE) languages. Here, we replicate this finding within the Bantu and Austronesian language families, and with new data for the IE languages. Number words can remain stable for 10 000 to over 100 000 years, or around 3.5-20 times longer than average rates of lexical replacement among the Swadesh list of 'fundamental vocabulary' items. Ordinal evidence suggests that number words also have slow rates of lexical replacement in the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia. We offer three hypotheses to explain these slow rates of replacement: (i) that the abstract linguistic-symbolic processing of 'number' links to evolutionari

SUBMITTER: Pagel M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5784043 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature