The Greek & Latin Roots of English (20 page)

The Tomb of the Diver. Fifth-century BCE wall painting (Paestum, Italy)

Ten is the very nature of number. The Greeks and all barbarians alike count up to ten, and having reached ten, revert again to the single unit
.

AETIUS (first-century CE Greek philosopher)

COUNTDOWN

The similarities among the words for the numbers one through ten were one of the first clues that led scholars of comparative and historical linguistics to posit a common ancestry for what is now called the Indo-European family of languages.

numerus, numeri = number

arithmos (άριθμός) = number

Let Me Count the Ways (in Indo-European) …

LATIN NUMBERS

How Long Did You Say I Have to Wait Here?

In the seventeenth century, when an outbreak of bubonic plague spread across Europe bringing death and devastation, the rulers of Venice ruled that ships arriving from plague-infested places had to wait for forty days before passengers could disembark, in order to insure that no one on the boat was infected with the disease. The Italian
Quarantina giorni
(forty days) is derived from
quadraginta
, the Latin word for forty. What is the current meaning of the English word
quarantine
?

Examples of Roman Numerals

It's Nothing

Although they certainly understood the quality of “nothingness,” neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a symbol that indicated zero, or the absence of quantity. The arithmetic representation of zero was devised by Hindu mathematicians and given an Arabic name
(sifr
= emptiness) by medieval Muslim scientists. The word passed into English in two forms:
cipher
and
zero
.

Latin Ordinal Numbers

We the People

In 1782, at the end of the American Revolutionary War,
e pluribus unum
was adopted as the official motto of the United States and inscribed on the Great Seal. You can find its image on all American paper currency.

E pluribus unum
= out of many, one

Latin Numerical Adverbs and Adjectives

“Take my word for it. The answer is two. I'm a college graduate.”
  (
www.cartoonstock.com
)

GREEK NUMBERS

Greek Ordinal Numbers

Other Greek ordinal numbers are rarely used in English compounds.

Greek Numerical Adverbs

The Years Fly By …

If we wish to note an anniversary, we can use the Latin numerical prefix with the combining form of the Latin noun for year.

annus, anni (year) > -ennial

e.g., centum + annus = centennial

It's Over

He asked for a finite number of ideas, but his speech went on to infinity. finio-finire-finitum = limit, fix; close

So Stop Wasting Time

The Romans called the point at which three roads met a
trivium
, a term that was also used to describe a public street. Perhaps because it was out in the open and therefore common, or perhaps because people would just hang out there, not talking about anything important, the topics of discussion could be described as
trivial
(via, viae = road).