Abstract of

by Glendon A. Lean

In modern technological societies we take the existence of numbers and the act of counting for granted: they occur in most everyday activities. They are regarded as being sufficiently important to warrant their occupying a substantial part of the primary school curriculum. Most of us, however, would find it difficult to answer with any authority several basic questions about number and counting. For example, how and when did numbers arise in human cultures: are they relatively recent inventions or are they an ancient feature of language? Is counting an important part of all cultures or only of some? Do all cultures count in essentially the same ways? In English, for example, we use what is known as a base 10 counting system and this is true of other European languages. Indeed our view of counting and number tends to be very much a Eurocentric one and yet the large majority the languages spoken in the world - about 4500 - are not European in nature but are the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas. If we take these into account we obtain a quite different picture of counting systems from that of the Eurocentric view.

This study, which attempts to answer these questions, is the culmination of more than twenty years on the counting systems of the indigenous and largely unwritten languages of the Pacific region and it involved extensive fieldwork as well as the consultation of published and rare unpublished sources. The outcome was that data were obtained on the counting systems of almost 900 languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, Irian Jaya, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. This material appears in 23 volumes and forms the data base of the thesis.

The picture which emerges is that there is a rich and diverse collection of counting systems with, for example, 250 base 2 systems, 335 base 5 systems, 203 base 10 systems not unlike the European types, as well as some rare base 4 and base 6 types. The study indicates for the first time how these systems are distributed geographically throughout the region.

Material obtained from a sample of societies enabled a number of counting ethnographies to be constructed. These indicate that societies do vary in the importance that they accord to number and counting, the degree to which they use large numbers, and the types of objects counted. Thus while existence of numbers and the practice of counting appear to be universal in the Pacific region, the variation between cultures with regard to these is considerable.

Of more theoretical interest, however, is that this study challenges the prevailing view of the prehistory of number. This says essentially that numbers were invented in one or more of the agricultural city states of the Middle East and thereafter diffused throughout the world. The alternative view of the prehistory of number developed here sees numerals as an integral and ancient part of the languages of early indigenous societies and that they were carried into the Pacific region with each of the major migrations over some tens of thousands of years.