By comparing Old Persian, Armenian, Greek, Hittite, Indo-Aryan and
other Indo-European languages which were spoken in the Near East, I
think it is possible that both major number and letter signs in this
region had an Indo-European origin and by considering the etymologies of
cardinal numbers in proto-IE, it can be said that these signs related
to fingers, for example proto-IE
oḱtṓw "eight":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/o%E1%B8%B1t%E1%B9%93w
is the dual of a stem *(H)oḱto- "four fingers".
First about Old Persian:
The
original IE language was not certainly Old Persian but at least about
these three numbers we see similar words, about "three" from proto-IE
*tri, we see *t>s/z in the ancient IE languages in this
region, like Ancient Greek and Hittite, compare to Ancient Greek
su, Hittite zik from proto-IE *tu- "thou, you", so I think
the original word was seri in this IE language.
So we have:
Old
Persian cuneiform sign for 4 is "ku", not "ka", so the original
language was in all probability a Centum language, like Hittite or
Latin, not Satem.
For 6 we also see a word
similar to Armenian wec, however it is certainly the original IE
word (*weḱs), not the one which begins with sh/s under influence of
Semitic.
Edited by Cyrus Shahmiri - 04-Aug-2019 at 05:21