Urth Net
"Five" in In Glory Like Their Star [Digest
9 quoted lines
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