How about the co-incidences that Upper Egypt and Sumer both used
base 5, and Lower Egypt and later Sumer both used base 10 in the
late Neolithic?
My only response is to quote from David Fowler's e-mail of
98-12-18 at 14:06:51 EST
strong artefactual evidence correlates protoliterate Mesopotamia
with predynastic (i.e. pre-Scorpion) Egypt (primarily stylistic and
functional loans of cylinder seals, pottery, architecture, etc from
Mesop, where they have long developmental histories, to Egypt where
they appear ex nihilo).
Manoel Almeida's e-mail on 12/29/98 at 11:52:40 AM EST asks:
Another striking coincidence was 6 = sei in Basc, another independent
language. A latter borrowing?
I don't think so. The Basque numbers are
ONE = Bat
TWO = Bi
THREE = Hiru
FOUR = Lau
FIVE = Bost
SIX = Sei
SEVEN = Zazpi
EIGHT = Zortzi
NINE = Bederatzi
TEN = Hamar
If you assume 20 consonants and 5 vowels, then the odds of any particular
word in two different languages having the same first two sounds is 1%.
Since only one of the ten numbers in Basque matches on the first two
sounds, I would say this is pure coincidence.
Staring at this list long enough I can see a base 5 pattern:
six = 5 + 1 = "bostbat" of which only the "s" survived?
seven = 5 + 2 = "bostbi" which became "zazpi"?
eight = 5 + 3 = "bosthiru" which became "osthir" which became "zortzi"?
nine = 5 + 3 = "bostlau" which became "bostra" which became "bederatzi"?
On the other hand, I can see about as strong a pattern for base
six, which means I am probably seeing things which aren't there.
Finally, as for possible relationships between Indo-European and
Semitic numbers, there are three possibilities.
1. coincidence (but the similarities between the words for 6 and 7 are
a lot stronger than the one cited above for Basque "sei")
2. copying
3. common ancestry. A lot of work has been done on the theory that
Indo-European and Semitic have a common ancestry.