We could count before we could write. Tallies, scratched on to rocks and bones, date back more than 40,000 years, while later accounting systems may have evolved into the first true writing. But are numbers a language, a natural phenomenon or both?
Universality is part of numbers' power. Yet there are countless variations in the ways cultures talk about them, from the trivial to the extreme. In the west, we express big numbers in groups of three decimal places: a thousand, a million, a billion. In Hindi, whose system derives from Sanskrit, numbers over a thousand are grouped by two decimal places. So a lakh, one hundred thousand, is written 1,00,000; a crore is 100 lakh, or 1,00,00,000; an arawb is 100 crore. Counting in Hindi is a challenge, as there's no standard formula for compiling the numbers one to 100, which need to be learned individually—a corollary to the sacred importance of numbers in the Vedic tradition, which 2,000 years ago was naming numbers as large as one followed by 421 zeroes, a dhvajagranishamani. Ancient Greece, in contrast, had no word for anything larger than 10,000: a myriad.
Like English, most languages count in base ten: once for each finger. There are also those, however, that count in bases five (Gumatj, from Australia), 15 (Huli, from Papua New Guinea), 20 (Tzotzil, from Mexico), and even six (Ndom, also Papua New Guinea) and eight (Yuki, from northern California). Most extreme of all is the Amazonian tribe the Pirahã, who reportedly have no concept of number beyond "a small amount" and "a big amount" (and whose language some claim is the first counterexample to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar). Some linguists believe this is impossible. Others think it's just unlikely. Either way, it returns us to an ancient conundrum: do numbers exist independently of us?
