Re: [HM] The Royal Oak
barnabas hughes (hcedu037@csun.edu)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 10:54:39 -0700 (PDT)
In case anyone is interested: Ed's remark about base-four would have me
note that several tribes of California Indians, noteably those living in
and around Ventura, counted by fours. A complete list of their words for
the numbers, 1 to 64, is in Old Mission Library-Archives, Santa Barbara,
a holograph by an early nineteenth century missionary. (I have seen it.)
While I am at it: there were some twenty linguistic families in California
and they used 4,5, 8, 10, and 20 for their bases, all depending on where
they lived rather than on the language or dialect they spoke.
Barney