The Curious Number 7

One, two, three, four, five. Išten, šina, šalaš, erbe, hamiš. Biir, ikki, us, tuört, bies. Those are the first five numbers in English, Akkadian and Yakut, a Siberian language. Don’t look much alike, do they? This is not too surprising, since the first is an Indo-European language, the second a Semitic one, and the third Turkic. But let’s look at the number seven in those same languages. Seven, sebe, sette. Sure do look awfully similar, don’t they? Especially given that we are in some cases comparing pronunciations which are literally millenia apart. And it doesn’t stop there. Ancient Egyptian was allegedly something like safhau, modern Hebrew is sheva/shiva (m/f), and Finnish is seitsemän. Chuvash, another Siberian Turkic language, is śiččĕ (ś is apparently pronounced something like ‘x’ in Chinese pinyin, like English ‘sh’ but with your lips in a smiling posture). And ancient Chinese was probably something like ‘tsit’.

OK, but not all languages have such similar-sounding words, right? Indeed, let’s look at some which do not follow this curious pattern: Sumerian, for one: ‘imin’ (literally ia + min, i.e. 5+2). Japanese: nana. Mongolian: doloo. Malay: tujuh. Hausa: bakwai. Quechua: pisqa. None of the languages grouped around the Eastern Asia seaboard have a word which sounds in any way similar. Nor do any of the languages in Africa or the Americas. Moreover, in the Turkic languages despite a prevalence of the form yéti, i.e. without an ‘s’ at the beginning, the Siberian languages around the edge of the Turkic language zone seem to have preserved an older pronunciation. Hungarian (which is a Central Asian but not Turkic language) with its form ‘hét’ seems to follow the pattern of the central Turkic zone.

So what seems to have happened here is that this one word – 7 – managed to spread itself all around Europe and Asia, but never made it to the Pacific. This spreading must have taken place many many thousands of years ago. Moreover, judging on the evidence of Sumerian, it probably did not happen concurrently with the spread of some other basic words which Sumerian shares with other language groups – words such as ‘gu(d)’ meaning cow. But what is curious is: why 7? Why only this number and no other? There are also several languages which share the number 6 (Semitic, Indo-European and probably Hungarian), but it is less widespread than 7. Again judging on the basis of Sumerian, we might postulate that the ancient forms of many languages lacked unique forms for the numbers above five, thus prompting borrowing of the others once counting became a useful skill. But if so, what about 8 and 9? Why weren’t they borrowed at the same time? What’s so special about the numbers 6 and 7?

I don’t know, but I bet the answer is significant.