ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
The deep history of the number words.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 13 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- The counting principle makes number words unique.Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Spatial evolution of human cultures inferred through Bayesian phylogenetic analysis.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- The cultural origins of symbolic number.Psychological review · 2022Article
- From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
- The history of number words in the world's languages-what have we learnt so far?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Quantifying the spatial pattern of dialect words spreading from a central population.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Hybrid Hashtags: #YouKnowYoureAKiwiWhen Your Tweet Contains Māori and English.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2020Article
- Usage frequency and lexical class determine the evolution of kinship terms in Indo-European.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Dominant words rise to the top by positive frequency-dependent selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?BMC biology · 2017Article
- Introduction: The origins of numerical abilities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- The problem with percentages.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We have previously shown that the 'low limit' number words (from one to five) have exceptionally slow rates of lexical replacement when measured across the Indo-European (IE) languages. Here, we replicate this finding within the Bantu and Austronesian language families, and with new data for the IE languages. Number words can remain stable for 10 000 to over 100 000 years, or around 3.5-20 times longer than average rates of lexical replacement among the Swadesh list of 'fundamental vocabulary' items. Ordinal evidence suggests that number words also have slow rates of lexical replacement in the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia. We offer three hypotheses to explain these slow rates of replacement: (i) that the abstract linguistic-symbolic processing of 'number' links to evolutionarily conserved brain regions associated with numerosity; (ii) that number words are unambiguous and therefore have lower 'mutation rates'; and (iii) that the number words occupy a region of the phonetic space that is relatively full and therefore resist change because alternatives are unlikely to be as 'good' as the original word.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'.
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