#35 Menninger: Man, woman, many … When Society was Three
Society’s oldest ‘recorded history’ begins here…
Menninger wrote:
The Grammatical Double Number (the Dual)
The absorption of the number into the object led to remarkable word forms for the double (the dual), the triple (the trial) and, in some languages of the South Pacific islands, even the quadruple (the quaternal) number. Besides the singular, the German language has only the indefinite plural (the multiple number): der Mann — die Männer. If, to make up a hypothetical example, Manna (in German) were to mean “two men,” then this would be a grammatical dual, an inflected word form indicating the specific number two. This embodiment of the number word into the noun itself is reminiscent of the primitive incorporation of all the details of the “rabbit death” (see p. 10) into a single word. Specific grammatical number words, such as “dual,” thus belong to an early stage of civilization. The ancestral Indo-European language had a form of dual which gradually disappeared from the individual languages of the Indo- European family, surviving here and there only in vestigial form…
Two trees, two people, formed not with the dual but with the number word Two, denotes merely a fortuitous and not an intrinsic or willed duality.
I — Thou.
The first step beyond the One, however, was taken at a still lower level of thought. To the awakening consciousness the world is confronted with himself; the I is opposed to and distinct from what is not I, the thou, the other. Linguistically, too, it is not unlikely that the Indo-European number word duṷo is in some way related to the German du and the English thou. In the Sumerian number sequence, “one” and “two” have the meaning “man” and “woman,” respectively.
In this primeval dichotomy of the mind, what was One before now breaks apart into One and Two. To man the Two is at first another man, a living You with whom he becomes involved in address and response, and thus in spite of the severance still feels a bond. This is echoed in the fact that the grammatical dual survived much longer in personal pronouns than in other classes of words…
Two as the Limit of Counting.
All this evidence shows that Two has a special status and is not just a number like any other in the number sequence, but instead is that extraordinary number attained by early man’s first hesitant step toward counting. A hesitant step, indeed — for it is not as though man had taken all the following steps at once, running through and building up the whole number sequence. On the contrary, he stopped to catch his breath, as it were. The number 2 is a frontier in counting, the first and oldest of the many we shall encounter.
This is proved not only by the grammatical dual form, or dual number, which we have just discussed, but by other fascinating pieces of evidence as well. In Arabic, for example, the numbers 1 and 2 are adjectives that modify the object counted and testify to the early stage at which number was regarded as an attribute of the thing counted, equivalent to “beautiful” or “big,” and not yet as an abstract general concept independent of the object counted. But the numbers following 3, 4, 5, and so on, are nouns…
The Step to Three.
With Three a new element appears in the concept of numbers. I — You: The I is still in a state of juxtaposition toward the You, but what lies beyond them, the It, is the Third, the Many, the Universe. This statement, in which psychological, linguistic, and numerical elements come together, may perhaps roughly paraphrase early man’s thinking about numbers. “One — two — many”: a curious counting pattern, but it is exactly mirrored in the grammatical number forms of the noun, singular — dual — plural, as in the Greek phílos, phílō, phíloi, where the third number form is thus the plural. An old Sakai in Malacca, on being asked his age, replied, “Sir, I am three years old.” To him 2 was the You, the near and familiar with which he lives, to which he feels related and with which he interacts, but this is no longer true of the It, the 3; for him that is the Many, the Alien, the Unknowable.
A magnificent confirmation of this is the ancient Sumerian number sequence, which begins: “Man, woman, many” ….
Many investigators suspect, with good reason, that in the number words “one, two, and three” are latent the roots of the personal pronouns “this, the, and that,” or even that the primordial forms of these pronouns became the first three number words.
Three is the “beyond,” the “trans-”. It has been thought that the Latin tres, 3, is related to the Latin trans, “across, beyond” (the root of trare, “to penetrate”; cf. intrare, “to enter by force”); and correspondingly the French trois, 3, to très, “very,” the English three to through and thus the Indo-European trejes to tre-. Even though this theory cannot be proved with certainty, it does have in its favor the striking linguistic resemblance and the possible interpretation of Three as the number transcending the old numerical barrier after number 2.
… The step to Three is the decisive one, which introduces the infinite progression into the number sequence. We recognize it from its action in reverse; Two is stripped of its unique position and is recognized as a number just like any other; the grammatical dual of the original Indo-European language disappears. Furthermore, from the cardinal numbers 3, 4, 5 are formed the ordinals “third, fourth, fifth,” and then by analogy, going backwards, from “the other” is developed the “second.” The world of numbers has entered the personal world (two = You) through the back door. Only “the first” still holds out: There is no such thing as a “firstest.” Whenever such a form does occur, as in the Turkish bir-inzi < bir, “one,” it indicates a number sequence that arose not out of a people’s own early levels of conception but was constructed by analogy with an already developed neighboring number sequence.
The step to Three is a step across the threshold of darkness, before which the concept “number” was still deeply rooted in the life of the soul, out into the prosaic but clear and bright light of practical life. If this step means a waning of the power of detachment, of the ability to impart to each number its own distinctive features obtained from the object itself, it is compensated by the growing power to build up the number sequence as a useful structure with applications of undreamed-of scope. This was not accomplished at a single stroke, of course, but was advanced time and again, from one numerical boundary to the next, at each of which the sequence pauses to catch its breath, as it were, and waits until it is overtaken by the reality of life and pushed on to new and higher numbers…
… [The Sumerian] number sequence does not differ essentially from any other “normal” sequence, except perhaps that it shows an unusually large number of very “early” characteristics.
[the point is …]
Thus there is an old counting limit following the Three, for the first three number words for 1 [geš], 2 [min], and 3 [eš] literally mean “man” [geš = man, penis, tree, or tool symbolized by a phallus], “woman” [min = distinct things, symbolized by a woman’s pubis], and “many” [eš] respectively: eš is the plural ending. The succeeding tens are made up of vigesimal groupings. Then geš, “the great unit” [man] also becomes a numerical rank.
[see below for pictorial explanations …]
The Source:
Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers, translated by Paul Broneer from the revised German edition. This Dover edition, first published in 1992, is an unabridged, unaltered republication of the English translation published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969 of the revised German edition of Zahlwort und Ziffer: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Zahlen, published by the Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Publishing Company, Göttingen, Germany, 1957–58.
With linguistic and pictorial assistance from:
The Sumerian Lexicon: A Dictionary Guide to the Ancient Sumerian Language, edited, compiled, and arranged by John Alan Halloran, Logogram Publishing, California, 2006
Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, translated from French by David Bellos, E.F. Harding, Sophie Wood, and Ian Monk, with support from European Commission, John Wiley & Sons, Harvill Press, 1998, 2000 [pp. 78, 94].