I have a small paperback dictionary at home that gives equivalents in 26
languages for 1000 common words. Although the relationships within a
language family are pretty obvious, I don't detect similarities across
family boundaries for most of these numbers, but I do see some interesting
comparisons when I look at the words for seven.
presumed Indo-European word: septm (from which it is easy to trace the
etymology of the word in the Indo-European languages)
7 in some non-Indo-European languages:
Hungarian: het Finnish: seitseman
Arabic: sabaa Hebrew: schivah Swahili: saba
Japanese: schichi
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395