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Notinole from Babylon to Middle-earth - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

We get our "century" from Latin but "hundred" is a good old Old English (Anglo-Saxon) word. "Hundred" is ultimately derived from the Indo-European root dek^m, from which the Latin peoples got their decimal and the English got their dozen. dek^m was a very important root word which influenced counting names in many languages. It is reasonable to guess that haran may have a similar unattested root. Our word year, however, simply comes to us from Indo-European yer, which had essentially the same meaning, referring to a solar year. Although Tolkien notes in the story of the first Elves that there was no common word or root for numbers greater than 144, we do have a Sindarin word for "thousand": meneg, from menegroth, "the thousand caves", the name of Thingol's city in Doriath. The name is quite ancient and predates "The Etymologies", as well as survives it (Tolkien stopped updating "The Etymologies" in the 1940s). Helge asks if meneg might not be translated idiomatically rather than literally, since in a duodecimal system the decimal 1000 value would not be significant and the duodecimal 1000 would have a decimal value of 1728. Such elaborate explanations immediately become irrelevant if we accept that the Elves' use of duodecimal values for traditional purposes in no way implies that their mathematics relied upon duodecimals. Meneg could be a purely Sindarin convention with no cognate in either Quenya or any Avarin language. Since the city was built with the aid of Dwarves, perhaps it could even be viewed as a borrowing from Khuzdul in some way. But there is no need for its meaning to be anything other than "thousand". Menegroth is itself a picturesque name. Did the city really have 1,000 caves or was the number just useful for conveying the idea there were a lot of caves? (It might be useful, however, for estimating the population of the city, but that is a topic best left idle for another day.) To be fair, Helge Fauskanger doesn't simply assert that the Elves were duodecimalists. He devotes a great deal of attention to possible decimal nomenclature. But I think the pursuit of duodecimal nomenclature is pointless. The first Elves were an illiterate bunch, a primitive people in many ways. They were the inventors of language (among the Children of Iluvatar) and eventually the Noldor devised the tengwar, just as the Sindar developed the cirth. But the retention of ancient numbers with special sociological or culture significance doesn't imply that the Elves did not, could not, evolve beyond such limitations. Their special nomenclature for decimal values ("ten", "hundred", "thousand") and the tengwar decimal numeral system imply very strongly that the Eldar, and the Dunedain, were base-ten users. It all adds up if you put the numbers together in the right way. So to speak.

J.R.R. Tolkien's depiction of 6431 in Tengwar.

J.R.R. Tolkien's depiction of 61 in Tengwar

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