Languages, numbers

[undyingking]

My mum just sent me this interesting list of the first ten numbers in various different languages, grouped by related origin:



She didn't include a list of which language was which, though, and I only knew a few of them for sure. But I figured I could have a decent educated guess at the others. Here below are my identifications, white-on-whited so highlight if you want to see. But before you do that, why not have a try yourself, in a comment?

1 Sanskrit?
2 Hindi
3 Bengali?

4 English
5 Dutch?
6 German
7 Swedish?

8 Latin
9 French
10 Italian
11 Spanish
12 Portuguese

13 Russian

14 Greek

15 Welsh
16 Gaelic / Irish?

17 no idea, clearly not Indo-European -- Basque maybe?

18 Arabic
19 Farsi?

20 Finnish?
21 Hungarian

22 sounds South-East Asian, Tagalog maybe?
23 ditto, Thai maybe?

24 Japanese

Comments

[theo]

From my imperfect knowledge (largely derived from categorising pages on Wikisource years ago before the language-specific versions were formed):
1. Sanskrit (Wikisource)
2. Hindi (learned from neighbours while living in Leicester)
3. Somewhere in or near India?
4. English (my father's language)
5 Dutch (learned while living in Belgium)
6 German (learned to translate board game rules)
7 Swedish (learned while living in Norway)
8 Latin (School)
9 French (Childhood holidays in Cherbourg)
10 Italian (as part of learning Latin)
11 Spanish (Sonia taught me this. She learned it at school)
12 Portugese (Learned aged 14 when I decided to model the Portugese army of 1808 in 1:25 scale)
13. Russian (School)
14. Greek (self-taught from a TYS book aged 9 when I wanted to learn more about the origins of my name)
15. Welsh (learned when renovating a mountain hut in the Brecon Beacons)
16. Breton (those Cherbourg holidays again)
17. Not even the beginning of a clue ...
18. Arabic (learned from my muslim nieces)
19. Not sure but would guess at Hebrew of which I have the vaguest memory from my early childhood
20. Finnish (learned from a pillow dictionary in Norway)
21. This might be Romanian. I had a gaming friend who told me his counting system. I seem to remember my mnemonic being "Ego Cato Harrumph!" At least I remember that phrase and I think it links to Ravi. On reflection: it cannot be a very good mnemonic.
22. Cantonese or Mandarin. Something I learned in Hong Kong, anyway.
23. No idea. Something oriental from its position in the list.
24. Japanese (taught by Yumi in the Sunrise Cafe)

Wow! That was better than I expected given my inability to communicate in anything much except English and Norwegian.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Excellent, and well done for being brave enough to take on the whole challenge!

I should have thought of Breton, bah.

21 is definitely Hungarian -- maybe your friend was from the Transylvanian part of Romania.

And I've now given up on anyone knowing 17, and checked -- it is indeed Basque.

[theo]

Hungarian! In that case the source was a colleague when I was a computer operator in London. But useless since I did not recall the correct language.

Basque is entirely beyond my experience although, as a pre-Indo-European isolate, it interests the archahaeologist in me.

And online research shows that the third language is Singhalese. I have never learned the cardinal numbers in Vietnamese despite being friendly with the owners of a Vietnamese take-away in Peckham, which would have seemed like an ideal opportunity. I must make the effort to distinguish Cantonese from Mandarin. I know only a few words of each and get them confused.