ESTONIAN ACADEMY
PUBLISHERS
eesti teaduste
akadeemia kirjastus
PUBLISHED
SINCE 1965
 
Linguistica Uralica cover
Linguistica Uralica
ISSN 1736-7506 (Electronic)
ISSN 0868-4731 (Print)
Čislitel'nye v ugorskich jazykach [Numerals in the Ugric Languages]; pp. 175–182
PDF | 10.3176/lu.2003.3.03

Author
László Honti
Abstract

Hungarian, Vogul and Ostyak have inherited the majority of their elementary, i. e. uncompounded numerals and other number words not derivated by suffixation from the Uralic, Finno-Ugric and the Ugric protolanguages. The stock of words denoting numbers has been considered as ”extraordinarily primitive” by some scholars not recognizing the organized structure of the numerals reconstructable in the Finno-Ugric etc. protolanguage.  The decimal system of numerals reflecting the very ancient decimal system of numeration in the Uralic language family constitutes the basis of numerals in all of the Uralic languages resp. the basis of numeration in the Uralic cultures, although there have been attempts in the history of Uralic comprative linguistics to render systems of numeration other than the decimal probable; I am going to point out why the starting points of these views have to be qualified as erroneous. An other goal of my paper related to the above mentioned subject is to examine briefly the structure of the not simple expressions denotating exact numeric values in the Ob-Ugric languages in relation to the number 10 and its integral multiples and powers resp. in relation to the number words for 10, 100 and 1000.

References

Honti,  L.  1993,  Die Grundzahlwörter der uralischen Sprachen, Budapest (Biblio­the­ca Uralica 11).

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