Say quarter er saltee or dacha saltee Say chinker saltee or dacha oney saltee Oney beong A beong say saltee Dooe beong say saltee or madza caroon .
10d. dieci soldi. 11d. undici soldi. 1s. 1s. 6d. 2s. 6d. (half crown, mezza corona.)[1]
One of these series simply adopts Italian numerals deci-
mally. But the other, when it has reached 6, having
had enough of novelty, makes 7 by 'six-one,' and so
continues. It is for no abstract reason that 6 is thus
made the turning-point, but simply because the coster-
monger is adding pence up to the silver sixpence, and
then adding pence again up to the shilling. Thus our duo-
decimal coinage has led to the practice of counting by
sixes, and produced a philological curiosity, a real senary
notation.
On evidence such as has been brought forward in this essay, the apparent relations of savage to civilized culture, as regards the Art of Counting, may now be briefly stated in conclusion. The principal methods to which the development of the higher arithmetic are due, lie outside the problem. They are mostly ingenious plans of express- ing numerical relation by written symbols. Among them are the Semitic scheme, and the Greek derived from it, of using the alphabet as a series of numerical symbols, a plan not quite discarded by ourselves, at least for ordinals, as in schedules A, B, &c.; the use of initials of numeral words as figures for the numbers themselves, as in Greek ΙΙ and Δ for 5 and 10, Roman C and M for 100 and 1,000; the device of expressing fractions, shown in a rudimentary stage in Greek γʹ, δʹ,, for ⅓, ¼, γδ for ¾; the introduction of the cipher or zero, by means of which the Arabic or Indian numerals have their value according to their position in a decimal order corresponding to the succession of the rows of the abacus; and lastly, the modern notation of decimal fractions by carrying down below the unit the proportional
1 J. C. Hotten, 'Slang Dictionary,' p. 218.
- ↑ 1