Terry Pratchett refers to this counting system in the Tiffany Aching[1] books.
Tiffany is called "jiggit" (the Yorkshire Dales word for twenty according to the article) by her grandmother as she is her granny's twentieth grandchild.
I grew up with them so take my glowing reviews with a pinch of salt.
The books are a wonderful take on humans. The discworld has a broad theme that stories are real and powerful in the same way humans often believe them to be. The way we see and talk about the world is how reality works there. So cold is more than the absence of heat, there are deafening silences that drown out sound and gods are formed by and from belief. Many more things but those would often give away part of a discovery that's best found while reading.
The characters range from fun to deep, and feel consistent.
Apart from the first two or three books being quite different, there's a solid consistency and branching and merging set of storylines across 30+ books.
Also there are many references to our world and/or puns that I slowly realise and get now I'm in my 30s. They feel like they contain just so much.
They're not a chore or a slog that's "worth it in the end" and there are various places you can just jump in.
Sir Pterry was a proper old school journalist and writer. He was incredibly well read and was meticulous in his research. Oh and he wrote some books! He had a facility with language that was often breathtaking and an understanding of people and relationships that is easily relatable.
He chose the medium of fantasy and really ran with it. After the first two Discworld novels he really got into his stride and would generally pick on a theme per book and really go to town on it. Who else could turn stamp collecting ("Going Postal") into a real page turner?
You get characters like the Patrician (a sort of medieval Italian city state despot crossed with ... well he's unique and can thrash a cryptic crossword and has an elderly dog) and Sam Vimes (from guttersnipe to Lord in a very complicated lifetime). You get real witches and wizards (some of who end up playing football - soz soccer). You get the memorable Granny Weatherwax and ... and. Basically you get loads of beautifully crafted and rendered characters. Oh and you get Gods and Death too (he rides a horse called Binky)
Pratchett has been accused of Literature and it would probably stick if his works were not so enjoyable and accessible to read. He has been translated into a lot of languages which implies to me that his world view really is that - a world view that is worth investigating.
That Sir Terry had a facility with language is true. It also does no justice to that aspect of his writing.
How could anyone with half an imagination read something like "Octarine ... the undisputed pigment of the imagination" and not laugh? I'm not even going to mention the reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits, or Cohen the Barbarian, or the many names of Bloody Stupid Johnson.
I find it marginally painful that someone is hesitant to try reading a new (to them) author. If one turns away from Pratchett in hesitation, what fate might befall Chinua Achebe, or Ryszard Kapuscinski, say? I wonder if it says something about the kind and quantity of pretentious garbage (literary, cinematic, political, and otherwise) that surrounds us and pervades almost all aspects of our lives - so much so that we are afraid of spending a little time reading a book that we might not like?
Satire/comedy helps me cope with the world. For me, his stories are a nice balance of story, pragmatism, stoicism, fantasy, whimsy, and most of all satire. I particularly love his dialog. I have been searching (in vain) for whimsical/clean satire that helps me cope since Pratchett’s passing.
I second the suggestion to give one a go. Pratchett is not for everyone though. I encouraged my office mate to read Going Postal; he liked it so so, but declined to read another. My flight instructor liked small gods at first, but then didn’t; he wanted to dissect it too literally. I think it bothered him that it didn’t validate his view point as an atheist, instead flirting with many of Pratchett’s common satire of organized religions. My son loved every Sam Vimes book, but didn’t care as much for the others. A good friend tried one, was ok with it, and then read Hogfather, after which he said “give me every one of these that has Death in it.” My daughters really enjoyed Tiffany Aching, I had read Maskerade earlier to them, but only when they did finish Tiffany Aching did they really want more of the witches. My opera trained daughter now counts Maskerade as one of her favorites. As others have pointed out, his earlier works are more whimsical (think Monty Python or Hitchhikers Guide). Near the end of his life, Raising Steam was sadly predictable in its plot as a “tying things up” song. Me personally, I didn’t care for the Rincewind novels, until I watched one of the BBC adaptations, the one with Jeremy Irons, and now I even like the Rincewind/Twoflower/Cohan books. My wife thinks they are all eye rollingly silly and wonders why we get so excited about them.
Which is meant to be a long winded way of illustrating that you may have to poke around a little to find the satire and/or personalities that really resonate with you.
If you’re looking for something that has the closest connection with programmer geek culture, then I suspect Going Postal with its satire on who controls the flow of information (e.g. the web), it’s “code shifters” and the “Smoking GNU”.
I'd suggest to make the small one-time investment of purchasing "Wyrd Sisters" to find out for ourself. If you like it, keep going as it gets better. If you don't like the style, the other books are not going to change your mind.
I started reading his books from the start again a few weeks ago after about 15 years of a break. The first few books aren't great because it feels like he hasn't quite decided yet what to do with the whole Discworld thing. The one mentioned above is the first where it feels coherent and his wit and craftsmanship with words come out. You are not missing any meaningful context by skipping the ones before.
The biggest thing to be hesitant about is how many of them there are, so if you want to collect them you'll have to invest in extra bookshelves. The "reading order" charts can also be daunting (though it mostly doesn't matter).
You can see jiggit in most of them (I assume that's the ancestral form and most ancestral ones, as the others differ quite a bit more from one another).
It's cognate with 'deich/déag' in Irish and 'deg' in Welsh, both of which mean 'ten', which is an interesting artifact, and likely down to 'dau ddeg' being one of the ways in Welsh of saying 'twenty', but that's a relatively recent change from influence from English and other languages, as the various Celtic languages are traditionally base-20. You can see some echoes of this in French to this day, as it inherited its manner of counting from Gaulish.
Thank you for sharing that, very interesting, especially the hickory dickory dock bit. I'm going to see if there is somewhere I can buy a poster of that sheep chart. Edit: apparently we can - https://www.beccahallillustration.co.uk/product-page/print-c...
It's not, not really. Consider where you pronounce 'm' and 'p': they're both bilabial consonants. It's pretty typical in Celtic languages to have initial 'consonant mutations' where a sound in a preceding word has got lost over time, but it affected the pronunciation of the word that followed it in a predictable fashion, which lead it being grammaticalised.
An example from Irish would be 'capall', which means 'horse', and 'na gcapall', meaning 'of the horses', as the genitive plural of 'capall' is also 'capall', but when you use the plural definite article with it, the pronunciation of the first letter changes from a /k/ to a /g/, and Irish marks this by preceding the 'c' with a 'g' (so you can see the underlying word).
Welsh and other members of the Brythonic family of Celtic languages have something similar, which can lead to 'p' and 'b' changing into 'mh' (an /m/ sound, but unvoiced) and 'm' respectively. This is called 'nasal mutation'.
So, what you're looking at is a possible remnant of nasal mutation in Cumbric.
12 is such a useful number given it has 2,3,4 and 6 as factors- lots of fairly simple mental math can get you pretty far.
20 is nice, but you could make the same argument for 30 (5x6). In both cases, there's too much overhead because you still have the useful 10 as a factor in any situation that doesn't need groups of rectangles.
I don't know if this adds much to the discussion, other than perhaps there isn't really a need for ranchers and bakers to use the same factors or base counting system?
Each of the four fingers on a hand has three phalanges, and thus three joints (not counting the thumb). That makes it easy to count to 12 on one hand, using the thumb to track which you're on. (I vaguely recall from school that this coms from Mesopotamia, but don't have a reference.)
One could make the same argument for 30, but 20 shows up repeatedly ("four score and seven", «quatrevingt-treize», 'Jiggit') and I can't think of any 30's. Months?
We've got 5 sausages to a jar over here, would go great with your 11 hot dog buns!
I've always wondered why sell that as a prime number, surely it can't be worth it to annoy your customers to sell them an extra sausage? Anyone introducing a reasonable amount would capture more purchases.
Or bags of bread with an uneven number of slices. Why are we inflicting this on each other?
The Welsh one seems closest to Scots Gaelic, interestingly, because the two languages aren't all that similar.
Aon, Dhà, Trì, Ceithir, and when you get to 9 Naoi, and then Deich. And then you start aon deug, dhà deug and so on. Fichead for 20 is much more like "jiggit" of Scots, Lakes, and Dales than ugain from Welsh, though.
> The Welsh one seems closest to Scots Gaelic, interestingly, because the two languages aren't all that similar.
This is explained in the text:
>> The original Celtic numerals were frequently forgotten, and their places supplied by words that were more or less founded on rhyme. And sometimes the Celtic words were supplemented by English ones. Owing to the corrupt forms that thus resulted, many of the formulae are of slight philological interest or value. That the original counting was in Celtic, chiefly appears from some forms that still remain. Thus the Welsh pump, five, explains the Eskdale pimp, and the Knaresborough pip, and others. The Welsh deg, ten, explains the forms dix, dec, dick, dik. But yan (whence yain, yaena, yah) is only a dialectal form of the English one. And tain, taena, tean are merely altered forms of two
The Welsh one is closest to Scots Gaelic because Welsh is still more or less alive, so people didn't forget the number words.
I thought that perhaps both Slavic and Celtic languages form branches of the Indo-European family, and it seems that the geographic range of speakers of precursors of these languages overlapped in iron-age Europe.
As a native Slavic speaker who tried to learn Gaelic I can assure you that similarities in terms of vocabulary or grammar are few and superficial. That said, pronunciation is much easier for us than native English speakers.
There are plenty if you know how to look for them, though some, such as grammaticalised palatalisation, are incidental, and others, such as the preservation of the habitual are more obvious. That said, the various Celtic languages are thought to have more historically in common with the Italic branch of languages (the remaining instances of that being the various Romance languages) than they do with the Slavic ones.
Welsh and Scottish Gaelic are more similar than they may seem at first, but took very different routes. The closest languages to Scottish Gaelic are Irish and Manx, however, as all are descendents of Middle Irish, and shared a common literary language up until the 18th century in the form of Classical Irish/Gaelic. You likely know this already, but the rest of HN might not be aware of this.
"Jiggit" is most likely from a similar origin to "dau ddeg" in Modern Welsh", though with some influence from Old Irish "fichet", which has a common etymology with Welsh "ugain".
For understanding the correspondence it's useful to know that Welsh "pump" sounds more or less (more in the south and less in the north) like "pimp". "Un" sounds like "een".
The Welsh column are just the regular Welsh numbers, put there from comparison with the sheep-counting numbers used in areas where a language similar to Welsh was once spoken. Welsh and Gaelic evolved independently and though they now sound very different, they're still closely related - with common vocabulary not shared by other languages, and similar grammars.
I'm not sure I quite get it. Or at least the article doesn't make much sense of it.
Is the idea that this is a helpful system because of it's rhyming? I've been trying to imagine how that would help counting sheep, but just can't come up with it.
I think the point is to put yourself in the place of someone so bereft of technology and formal education and imagine how you would tally sheep. Also interesting how you can probably get children started earlier with lending a hand if you teach them a counting system based on singing. This is probably why we have the alphabet song.
Edit: I also find it interesting that this is a system only for tallying, not arithmetic. As one of the articles in my ensuing dive pointed out, nobody says, “Miney + eeny = moe” or “Dik minus tethera equals…”
Edit: And that the first two counting numbers being “something ending in nuh” and “something starting with tuh/duh” is an ancient idea, coming from long before Roman times and predating Latin.
(and the continued astonishment I get at Indo-European languages being native from Iceland all the way to India and Siberia -- maybe I should say "from Iceland to Ireland, Italy to Iran and India")
I think it helps to watch the video of Thackery saying them outloud at the end of the post. The rhyming gives counting off in groups of five and then 20 a kind of rhythm that "1,2,3.." lacks.
I suspect if you have some sort of monotonous task that involves counting, the rhythm makes it easier to not loose your place or have your mind wander.
> Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorification. She realized one could take each herd and “count” it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of “numbers”, which were nonsense words like “one, two, three,…” specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented.
I recall a book that mentions this counting system being Cumbric and specifically being still in use by modern shepherds. The writer was from Cumbria so that would gel with it being a generic Brythonic thing. The Welsh and Scottish numbers are obviously cognate.
Very roughly, the brythonic languages are those languages that were spoken in Britain. The term Britain gets a bit complicated. There were two britains - the greater (larger) and the lessor (smaller). The greater one is now part of the UK and the lessor is Brittany in France. Great Britain is basically the bigger Britain! The term was taken on by King James 1 (England) 6 (Scotland) to describe the unity of Scotland and England. It looks like we can thank the ancient greeks for the name anyway - a bloke called Pytheas circumnavigated these shores and describes the "Pretannike". That is probably a greekism for whatever the locals called themselves back in the day - bretanns.
Before the Romans rocked up in 55 and 54BC and finally in 43AD, Brythonic languages were the norm in these isles and there were loads of them. I doubt there was any sort of "purity" or that the blasted things could even be pinned down in a modern formal sense. Bear in mind that 1500ish years later Shakespear (literally: shakes his spear) managed at least 20 odd spellings for his own name.
Anyway, the Romans buggered off and things got quite complicated from around 350AD onwards in these parts.
> There were two britains - the greater (larger) and the lessor (smaller). The greater one is now part of the UK and the lessor is Brittany in France. Great Britain is basically the bigger Britain!
That is the ordinary meaning of "great", yes.
The terminology is conventional; you can see the same thing in the division between "Great Russia" (today, "Russia"), "White Russia" (today, "White Russia"), and "Little Russia" (today, "Ukraine").
A lot of terminology that feels distinctive now turns out not to be when you look into it. I always felt the the title "Czar of all the Russias" was cooler than the titles taken by other European monarchs. But I learned that in fact, "regina omnium Britanniarum", literally "queen of all the Britains" was a title of Elizabeth II. I tend to assume the title goes back further than that.
Elizabeth II was certainly not the queen of Brittany. On the other hand, wikipedia does tell us that the classical Greek astronomer Ptolemy used "little Britain" to refer to Ireland, not Brittany, and she was the queen of Ireland. This would make "the Britains" synonymous with "the British Isles".
> It looks like we can thank the ancient greeks for the name anyway - a bloke called Pytheas circumnavigated these shores and describes the "Pretannike". That is probably a greekism for whatever the locals called themselves back in the day - bretanns.
Pytheas gives that name to the island, not the people. He would have distinguished between /b/ and /p/ - that is the difference between the ancient Greek letters B and Π - so there is no reason to believe the locals used a /b/. The Welsh form, Prydain, still uses P today.
For whatever reason, I'm reminded of "Waka Flocka Flame"
I'm a hip-hop fan but never really got into his work -- but I still appreciated what a clever name he selected for himself, like pretty much guaranteed some shine (and probably name sampling) off the rhythm of the name alone.
You can do this without numbers. Put a stone for every sheep into a sack and when you need to check the herd's completeness you take a stone out for every sheep and hope that the sack is eventually empty. That's an old shepherd's technique if I remember correctly.
That's not really the point here: this counting system is what's leftover from various Cumbric (an extinct language related to Welsh) dialects, which is what makes this interesting. Yan = (welsh) un = one; tan = (welsh) dau/dwy = two; tethera = (welsh) tri/tair = three - you can see the influence from pethera for rhyming purposes; pethera = (welsh) pedwar/pedair = four; pimp = (welsh) pum(p) = five, &c.
The welsh ones seem eerily similar to Urdu numbers. 9 (nau) & 2 (dau) are in fact identical. Welsh isn’t even an indo aryan language. But them perhaps this system may in fact be?
There's a larger proposed family of languages that combine Indo-Aryan with the families of European languages. This is also why there is a lot of overlap in European languages and Indian (I am using Indian to mean all Sanskrit / Persian derivatives spoken in the Indian subcontinent). For example, a common root is the word dio or deo, which in Hindi we see as "Deva" and in Spanish we would see "Dio", but they both sort of correspond to God and come from the PIE for the same.
Tiffany is called "jiggit" (the Yorkshire Dales word for twenty according to the article) by her grandmother as she is her granny's twentieth grandchild.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Aching