Chapter NUGGURKOTE to NUMERICAL AFFIXES, CO-EFFICIENTS of N by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

employer at the moment, replied : ‘Ja freilich ! dreizehn Stück Amerikaner !’

The same peculiar idiom that has been described in the extract from Crawfurd as existing in Malay, is found also in Burmese. The Burmese affixes seem to be more numerous, and their classification to be somewhat more arbitrary and sophisticated. Thus oos, a root implying ‘chief’ or ‘first,’ is applied to kings, divinities, priests, &c. ; Yauk, ‘a male,’ to rational beings not divine ; Gaung, ‘a brute beast,’ to irrational beings ; Pya implying superficial extent, to dollars, countries, dishes, blankets, &c. ; Lun, implying rotundity, to eggs, loaves, bottles, cups, toes, fingers, candles, bamboos, hands, feet, &c. ; Tseng and Gyaung, ‘extension in a straight line,’ to rods, lines, spears, roads, &c.

The same idiom exists in Siamese, and traces of it appear in some of the vocabularies that have been collected of tribes on the frontier of China and Tibet, indicated by the fact that the numerals in such vocabularies in various instances show identity of origin in the essential part of the numeral, whilst a different aspect is given to the whole word by a variation in what appears to be the numeral-affix² (or what Mr. Brian Hodgson calls the ‘servile affix’). The idiom exists in the principal vernaculars of China itself, and it is a transfer of this idiom from Chinese dialects to Pigeon- English which has produced the piecey, which in that quaint jargon seems to be used as the universal numerical affix (“Two piecey cooly,” “three piecey dollar,” &c.).

This one pigeon phrase represents scores that are used in the vernaculars. For in some languages the system has taken what seems an extravagant development, which must form a great difficulty in the acquisition of colloquial use by foreigners. Some approximate statistics on this subject will be given below.

The idiom is found in Japanese and Corean, but it is in these cases possibly not indigenous, but an adoption from the Chinese.

It is found in several languages of C. America, i.e. the Quiché of Guatemala, the Nahault of Mexico Proper ; and in at least two other languages (Tep and Pirinda) of the same region. The following are given as the co-efficients or determinatives chiefly used in the (Nahualt or) Mexican. Compare them with the examples of Malay and Burmese usage already given :

Tetl (a stone) used for roundish or cylindrical objects ; e.g. eggs, beans, cacao beans, cherries, prickly-pears, Spanish loaves, &c., also for books, and fowls :

Pantli (?) for long rows of persons and things ; also for walls and furrows :

Tlamantli (from mana, to spread on the ground), for shoes, dishes, basins, paper, &c., also for speeches and sermons :

Olotl (maize-grains) for ears of maize, cacao-pods, bananas : also for flint arrow-heads (see W. v. Humboldt, Kawi-Sprache, ii. 265).

I have, by the kind aid of my friend Professor Terrien de la Couperie, compiled a list of nearly fifty languages in which this curious idiom exists. But it takes up too much space to be inserted here. I may, however, give his statistics of the number of such determinatives, as assigned in the grammars of some of these languages In Chinese vernaculars, from 33 in the Shanghai vernacular to 110 in that of Fuchau. In Corean, 12 ; in Japanese, 16 ; in Annamite, 106 ; in Siamese, 24 ; in Shan, 42 ; in Burmese, 40 ; in Malay and Javanese, 19.

If I am not mistaken, the propensity to give certain technical and appropriated titles to couples of certain beasts and birds, which had such an extensive development in old English sporting phraseology, and still partly survives, had its root in the same state of mind, viz. difficulty in grasping the idea of abstract numbers, and a dislike to their use. Some light to me was, many years ago, thrown upon this feeling, and on the origin of the idiom of which we have been speaking, by a passage in a modern book, which is the more noteworthy as the author does not make any reference to the existence of this idiom in any language, and possibly was not aware of it:

“On entering into conversation with the (Red) Indian, it becomes speedily apparent that he is unable to comprehend the idea of abstract numbers. They exist in his mind only as associated ideas. He has a distinct conception of five dogs or five deer, but he is so unaccustomed to the idea of number as a thing apart from specific objects, that I have tried in vain to get an Indian to admit that the idea of the number five, as associated in his mind with five dogs, is identical, as far as number is concerned, with that of five fingers.”—Wilson’s Pre-historic Man, 1st edition ii. 470.) [Also see Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd edition i. 252 seqq.].


Thus it seems probable that the use of the numeral co-efficient, whether in the Malay idiom or in our old sporting phraseology, is a kind of survival of the effort to bridge the difficulty felt, in identifying abstract numbers as applied to different objects, by the introduction of a common concrete term.

Traces of a like tendency, though probably grown into a mere fashion and artificially developed, are common in Hindustani and Persian, especially in the official written style of munshis, who delight in what seemed to me, before my attention was called to the Indo-Chinese idiom, the wilful surplusage (e.g.) of two ‘sheets’ (fard) of letters, also used with quilts, carpets, &c. ; three ‘persons’ (nafar) of