Numerals in Ahua

One of the first things the learner of a language wishes to know is how to count. To dissuade the reader from this, we cannot do better than to quote from Aalberg's "Remarks towards an outline of some aspects of the Water Language", the most generally respected study of Ahua:

Whereas he [Aalberg's Ahuan informant] gave single words of Ahua for many highly complex and apparently arbitrary concepts (such as kktsô = "zither that sounds like a tree"), names for numbers took a great variety of forms, to the extent that no two occurrences of the notion of, say, "5", would ever be referred to by the same word. The data he furnished are sketchy, but we list them here.

zero: fholg, fal, fh', 'g, û
one: 'g', tmklo, l/ll, l/ll, (he listed six sounds between l and ll which he insisted were distinct), iinhh, and several words with multiple simultaneous clicks which were beyond our ability to transcribe.
two: The informant gave a list of several hundred words, which it would be futile to list, since this was (he told us) only a tiny fragment of all of the possible names for the number 2.
three: krr

We suspect that krr was more of a linguistic shrug and really meant "the complexity of this notion far exceeds your capacity for understanding".

As for higher numerals, he denied the possibility of giving them names, for the context in which they occurred would necessitate them not merely being named differently, but being expressed in completely different ways on every occasion. But how then can you do mathematics?, we asked. He responded that it was impossible to do mathematics in any other way, implicitly characterising all the mathematical achievements of the rest of the world as primitive gropings in the dark. As Ahuan mathematics -- such hints of it as have been available and understood outside Ahua -- has provided some of the most seminal insights of our century, we were not in a position to argue. We were unable to draw from him any further information on the subject of numbers.


Richard Kennaway, jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk