Module 10: Telling numbers

	1	2	3	4	5
L1	en	twene	thria	fiuwar	fif
L2	jedyn	dwaj	tři	štyri	pjeć
L3	i	liang	san	ssu	wu
L4	eka	dvau	trayas	catur	pañca
L5	ichi	ni	san	shi	go
L6	echad	shnayim	shlosha	arba?a	chamishasha
L7	mot	hai	ba	bon	nam
L8	ün	duos	trais	quatter	tschinch
L9	hana	tul	set	net	tasŏt
L10	yaw	daw	dree	tsaloor	pindze
L11	uno	dos	tres	cuatro	cinco
L12	nigen	khoyar	ghorban	durben	tabon

The languages in bold type, i.e. the languages 1, 2, 4, 8, 10 and 11 are related, They all belong to the Indo-European language family.

Most people identify at least some of these languages as belonging together on this very small basis. This, of course, is not sufficient to prove that these languages are related, but it shows that basic numbers are an excellent field of study for this kind of question.

Just in case you are interested, these are the languages involved in the exercise:

L1 Old English

L2 Czech

L3 Mandarin Chinese

L4 Sanskrit

L5 Japanese

L6 Hebrew

L7 Vietnamese

L8 Rhaeto-Romanic

L9 Korean

L10 Albanian

L11 Spanish

L12 Mongolian