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Rating:  Summary: A bit stilted and dense, but fascinating nevertheless Review: Number Words and Number Symbols is a translation of a work originally in German, and it shows. While the discussions of the origins of various cultures and languages' symbols and words for numbers is almost encylopedic in its completion, it can be very stilted reading at times.If you don't mind sometimes long and verbose reading, then this is certainly one of the best works on the subject out there. I would quibble that Menninger gives the East less coverage than the West, but his comparisons of number words across Indo-European languages is simply fascinating. Also, too are his theories about how the displacement of one language by another in a region can often lead to weird anomalies in number counting.
Rating:  Summary: A bit stilted and dense, but fascinating nevertheless Review: Number Words and Number Symbols is a translation of a work originally in German, and it shows. While the discussions of the origins of various cultures and languages' symbols and words for numbers is almost encylopedic in its completion, it can be very stilted reading at times. If you don't mind sometimes long and verbose reading, then this is certainly one of the best works on the subject out there. I would quibble that Menninger gives the East less coverage than the West, but his comparisons of number words across Indo-European languages is simply fascinating. Also, too are his theories about how the displacement of one language by another in a region can often lead to weird anomalies in number counting.
Rating:  Summary: Why we count the way we do Review: Simply, the intellectual archaeology of our numerical universe
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