Talk: Complexity counts: the unusual case of Indo-Aryan numeral systems
Time
Tuesday, 12. December 2023
11:45 - 13:15
Location
online
Organizer
Department of Linguistics
Speaker:
Chundra Cathcart (University of Zurich)
The numeral systems of Indo-Aryan are unusual, since they exhibit no regular rules and each number from 1 to 99 must be memorized and stored individually (Bright, 1969; Berger, 1992). In this talk, I attempt to situate Indo-Aryan languages within the typology of cross-linguistic numeral systems, and explore the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that may be responsible for the persistence of complex systems in these languages.