8 ms·

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp – an old system for counting sheep (2013)

98 points by vector_spaces 4y ago

z7 4y ago
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.
- talideon 4y ago
  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.
throwaway81523 4y ago
Before that, it was even more cumbersome. See https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week121.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week121.html : > 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.
dnchdnd 4y ago
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?
- govg 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages?wprov=... 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.
jrm4 4y ago
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. Like brilliant in how "sort of dumb" it sounded.
Schattenbaer 4y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Aching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Aching
- masklinn 4y ago
  For the wiki on the counting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera 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).
  - talideon 4y ago
    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.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  HN should apply some sort of Pratchett badge whenever Pratchett gets mentioned. In lieu of, here’s +50 karma to you sir.
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    I’ve been hesitant to read the discworld books? What makes them so good?
    - climb_stealth 4y ago
      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.
snthpy 4y ago
Does this help with getting kids to sleep at all?
I_complete_me 4y ago
Here's Jake Thackray singing a song with this in it. Wonderful stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI. Edit: Just noticed this is referenced in the article. Sorry.
- rwmj 4y ago
  Jake Thackray is always worth a reference!
Gordonjcp 4y ago
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.
- DonaldFisk 4y ago
  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.
- talideon 4y ago
  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".
- timeon 4y ago
  > Aon, Dhà, Trì, Ceithir This resembles Slavic: jeden, dva, tri, stiri
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic_borrowings#Slavic_and_Celtic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic_borrowings#Slavic...
  - 4y ago
reedf1 4y ago
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.
- talideon 4y ago
  What you're seeing is an echo of a dead language that's turned into a tradition.
- Smaug123 4y ago
  It makes about as much sense as "eeny meeny miney mo" (or, for that matter, "one two three four"). It just sort of happened.
- sdflhasjd 4y ago
  I don't think there's a purpose per-se, it's just a small island of preserved archaic language.
- raldi 4y ago
  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.
  - schoen 4y ago
    It's kind of amazing how thorough this particular area of reconstruction is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_numerals (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")
finnh 4y ago
The secret to counting sheep is easy: just count the legs and divide by four.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  You might be thrown off by the variance. :) “Regina, the three legged lamb” https://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/this-adorable-three-legged-lamb-loves-sweaters-and-will-stea https://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/this-adorable-three-legg...
- Cerium 4y ago
  Count the legs, add three and divide by four to ensure partial sheep are properly counted by integer division.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dblack12705 4y ago
This counting system is fascinating! I wrote an article about this as well: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-dik https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-dik
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  Yours is more informative, thank you!
- version_five 4y ago
  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-cumbrian-dialect-numbers https://www.beccahallillustration.co.uk/product-page/print-c...
- throwoutway 4y ago
  You mark number 4 as Pethera, but in the image/poster it is Methera. Is there a discrepancy? Good post btw !
  - talideon 4y ago
    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.
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
I first heard of this from an Adrian Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds album: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yan-Tyan-Tethera-Metheral-Shepherds/dp/B002NKO1XW https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yan-Tyan-Tethera-Metheral-Shepherds... (Yes, it's that Adrian Edmondson from The Young Ones, Bottom etc)
082349872349872 4y ago
Shepherds (and ranchers) count moving things, so they stand at the gate and use fingers, winding up with groupings of 10s. Bakers count stationary things, so they like obvious groups of rectangles, and 3x4 is much nicer than 5x2, winding up with groupings of 12s. To this day hot dogs and buns are sold in incommensurate packages. (also, might 20s in numbering systems come about because 2x10 and 4x5 is a nice number for both ranchers and bakers?)
- aaron695 4y ago
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  I feel the need to point out that it's a long road from steer to hot dog, and you don't usually get them from a rancher.
- somrand0 4y ago
  wow, that's a very interesting perspective on the difference between 10 and 12 as numeral system bases. also, what a terrible state of affairs for obsessively-minded people. that we cannot even out buns and hotdogs.
  - Phemist 4y ago
    In my home country hot dogs are packaged by the 11. Prime numbers are the worst (haha, language joke intended)
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      but are they the curry worst?
    - Aachen 4y ago
      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?
gerdesj 4y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > 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. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Prydain https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Prydain

98 points by vector_spaces 4y ago

z7 4y ago

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.

talideon 4y ago
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.

throwaway81523 4y ago

Before that, it was even more cumbersome. See https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week121.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week121.html : > 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.

dnchdnd 4y ago

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?

govg 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages?wprov=... 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.

jrm4 4y ago

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. Like brilliant in how "sort of dumb" it sounded.

Schattenbaer 4y ago

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Aching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Aching

masklinn 4y ago
For the wiki on the counting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera 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).
- talideon 4y ago
  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.
travisgriggs 4y ago
HN should apply some sort of Pratchett badge whenever Pratchett gets mentioned. In lieu of, here’s +50 karma to you sir.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  I’ve been hesitant to read the discworld books? What makes them so good?
  - climb_stealth 4y ago
    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.

snthpy 4y ago

Does this help with getting kids to sleep at all?

I_complete_me 4y ago

Here's Jake Thackray singing a song with this in it. Wonderful stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI. Edit: Just noticed this is referenced in the article. Sorry.

rwmj 4y ago
Jake Thackray is always worth a reference!

Gordonjcp 4y ago

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.

DonaldFisk 4y ago
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.
talideon 4y ago
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".
timeon 4y ago
> Aon, Dhà, Trì, Ceithir This resembles Slavic: jeden, dva, tri, stiri
- mannykannot 4y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic_borrowings#Slavic_and_Celtic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic_borrowings#Slavic...
- 4y ago

reedf1 4y ago

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.

talideon 4y ago
What you're seeing is an echo of a dead language that's turned into a tradition.
Smaug123 4y ago
It makes about as much sense as "eeny meeny miney mo" (or, for that matter, "one two three four"). It just sort of happened.
sdflhasjd 4y ago
I don't think there's a purpose per-se, it's just a small island of preserved archaic language.
raldi 4y ago
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.
- schoen 4y ago
  It's kind of amazing how thorough this particular area of reconstruction is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_numerals (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")

finnh 4y ago

The secret to counting sheep is easy: just count the legs and divide by four.

Tagbert 4y ago
You might be thrown off by the variance. :) “Regina, the three legged lamb” https://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/this-adorable-three-legged-lamb-loves-sweaters-and-will-stea https://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/this-adorable-three-legg...
Cerium 4y ago
Count the legs, add three and divide by four to ensure partial sheep are properly counted by integer division.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dblack12705 4y ago

This counting system is fascinating! I wrote an article about this as well: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-dik https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-dik

MerelyMortal 4y ago
Yours is more informative, thank you!
version_five 4y ago
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-cumbrian-dialect-numbers https://www.beccahallillustration.co.uk/product-page/print-c...
throwoutway 4y ago
You mark number 4 as Pethera, but in the image/poster it is Methera. Is there a discrepancy? Good post btw !
- talideon 4y ago
  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.

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

I first heard of this from an Adrian Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds album: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yan-Tyan-Tethera-Metheral-Shepherds/dp/B002NKO1XW https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yan-Tyan-Tethera-Metheral-Shepherds... (Yes, it's that Adrian Edmondson from The Young Ones, Bottom etc)

082349872349872 4y ago

Shepherds (and ranchers) count moving things, so they stand at the gate and use fingers, winding up with groupings of 10s. Bakers count stationary things, so they like obvious groups of rectangles, and 3x4 is much nicer than 5x2, winding up with groupings of 12s. To this day hot dogs and buns are sold in incommensurate packages. (also, might 20s in numbering systems come about because 2x10 and 4x5 is a nice number for both ranchers and bakers?)

aaron695 4y ago
JasonFruit 4y ago
I feel the need to point out that it's a long road from steer to hot dog, and you don't usually get them from a rancher.
somrand0 4y ago
wow, that's a very interesting perspective on the difference between 10 and 12 as numeral system bases. also, what a terrible state of affairs for obsessively-minded people. that we cannot even out buns and hotdogs.
- Phemist 4y ago
  In my home country hot dogs are packaged by the 11. Prime numbers are the worst (haha, language joke intended)
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    but are they the curry worst?
  - Aachen 4y ago
    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?

gerdesj 4y ago

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.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> 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. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Prydain https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Prydain