Tetl (a stone) used for roundish or cylindrical objects; e.g. eggs, beans, cacao beans, cherries, prickly-pears, Spanish loaves, &c., also for books, and fowls:
Pantli (?) for long rows of persons and things; also for walls and furrows:
Tlamantli (from mana, to spread on the ground), for shoes, dishes, basins, paper, &c., also for speeches and sermons:
Olotl (maize-grains) for ears of maize, cacao-pods, bananas: also for flint arrow-heads (see W. v. Humboldt, Kawi-Sprache, ii. 265).
I have, by the kind aid of my friend Professor Terrien de la Couperie, compiled a list of nearly fifty languages in which this curious idiom exists. But it takes up too much space to be inserted here. I may, however, give his statistics of the number of such determinatives, as assigned in the grammars of some of these languages. In Chinese vernaculars, from 33 in the Shanghai vernacular to 110 in that of Fuchau. In Corean, 12; in Japanese, 16; in Annamite, 106; in Siamese, 24; in Shan, 42; in Burmese, 40; in Malay and Javanese, 19.
If I am not mistaken, the propensity to give certain technical and appropriated titles to couples of certain beasts and birds, which had such an extensive development in old English sporting phraseology, and still partly survives, had its root in the same state of mind, viz. difficulty in grasping the idea of abstract numbers, and a dislike to their use. Some light to me was, many years ago, thrown upon this feeling, and on the origin of the idiom of which we have been speaking, by a passage in a modern book, which is the more noteworthy as the author does not make any reference to the existence of this idiom in any language, and possibly was not aware of it:
"On entering into conversation with the (Red) Indian, it becomes speedily apparent that he is unable to comprehend the idea of abstract numbers. They exist in his mind only as associated ideas. He has a distinct conception of five dogs or five deer, but he is so unaccustomed to the idea of number as a thing apart from specific objects, that I have tried in vain to get an Indian to admit that the idea of the number five, as associated in his mind with five dogs, is identical, as far as number is concerned, with that of five fingers."—(Wilson's Prehistoric Man, 1st ed. ii. 470.) [Also see Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd ed. i. 252 seqq.].
Thus it seems probable that the use of the numeral co-efficient, whether in the Malay idiom or in our old sporting phraseology, is a kind of survival of the effort to bridge the difficulty felt, in identifying abstract numbers as applied to different objects, by the introduction of a common concrete term.
Traces of a like tendency, though probably grown into a mere fashion and artificially developed, are common in Hindustani and Persian, especially in the official written style of munshīs, who delight in what seemed to me, before my attention was called to the Indo-Chinese idiom, the wilful surplusage (e.g.) of two 'sheets' (fard) of letters, also used with quilts, carpets, &c.; three 'persons' (nafar) of barḳandāzes; five 'rope' (rās) of buffaloes; ten 'chains' (zanjīr) of elephants; twenty 'grips' (ḳabẓa) of swords, &c. But I was not aware of the extent of the idiom in the munshī's repertory till I found it displayed in Mr. Carnegy's Kachahri Technicalities, under the head of Muḥāwara (Idioms or Phrases). Besides those just quoted, we there find 'adad ('number') used with coins, utensils, and sleeveless garments; dāna ('grain') with pearls and coral beads; dast ('hand') with falcons, &c., shields, and robes of honour; jild (volume, lit. 'skin') with books; muhār ('nose-bit') with camels; ḳiṭa ('portion,' piecey!) with precious stones, gardens, tanks, fields, letters; manzil ('a stage on a journey, an alighting place') with tents, boats, houses, carriages, beds, howdas, &c.; sāz ('an instrument') with guitars, &c.; silk ('thread') with necklaces of all sorts, &c. Several of these, with others purely Turkish, are used also in Osmanli Turkish.[[192]]
NUNCATIES, s. Rich cakes made by the Mahommedans in W. India chiefly imported into Bombay from Surat. [There is a Pers. word, nānḵhat̤āi, 'bread of Cathay or China,' with which this word has been connected. But Mr. Weir, Collector of Surat, writes that it is really nankhaṭāī, Pers. nān, 'bread,' and Mahr. khaṭ, shaṭ, 'six'; meaning a special kind of cake composed of six ingredients—wheat-flour, eggs, sugar, butter or ghee, leaven produced from toddy or grain, and almonds.]