# "Five" in In Glory Like Their Star [Digest *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 09 Oct 2001* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### James Jordan *09 Oct 2001, 16:24* > At 04:20 PM 10/9/2001 -0400, you wrote: > The PIE for "five" is *penkwe, not *pan > > The PIE for "all" is *pan or *pant. > > I don't have my references here, but I believe > the two are distinct. > > -John Hmmm. I'm no expert here at all, but I happened to be listening to a series of lectures on the History of the English Language from The Teaching Company, and the speaker said that "five" and "all" (pn and pn) were basically the same.That's what jogged my dim memory. I don't recall if that's because of the number of digits in a hand. At any rate, the real question is what Wolfe thought, given the way he likes to trade on etymologies, and this explanation is all I've come up with that begins to make sense. I guess somebody could ask Wolfe, but he'd probably just smile.... Jim Jordan ---