Ilongot Number System - A Wild Exception (Updated 5/12/07)

The Ilongots are the only group in the entire Western Malayo-Polynesian language family area (coloured violet on the map below) that still retain their original non-decimal counting system, where everything is hunky-dory up to No 5, then goes 5+1, 5+2, etc, in the usual way of people who have not yet made the break from counting their fingers to having a full decimal system.

The Ilongots are a head-hunting tribe of Central Luzon (the northernmost large island of the Philippines). You can find out more about them here and here, and here.
"The Ilongot live in Nueva Vizcaya Province of Luzon in the Philippines. They numbered about 2,500 in 1975. The name "Ilongot" is Tagalog and Spanish, and is derived from "Quirungut" (of the forest), one of the people's own names for themselves. The Ilongot language is Austronesian, and there are three dialects: Egongut, Italon, and Abaka. They use Ilocano and Tagalog in trading. The Ilongot are culturally conservative and unsubjugated. They live as an enclave and resist incursions into their territory".

Their numbers go:

1	sít	2	deva	3	tago	4	epát	5	gima,tambiang
6	tambiang nu sít	7	tambiang nu dava	8	tambiánggot tagó	9	tambiang nu apát	10	támpu

I don't know their words for 11-19, or if they continue carrying on to count their toes, but they do call twenty duwampu, which means 'two tens', ie they do (now) have a decimal system, after all.

They call No 5 gima, which is the usual lima word for 5, but they also have tambiang, which is remarkably close to many of the words from New Guinea, more than 3000km away (and not used anywhere at all in between those areas). Bang, if you remember from my earlier post, is very widespread as a 'hand/five' word there.

This strengthens my case that the standard proto-Austronesian numbers:
esa/isa *duSa *telu *Sepat *lima *enem *pitu *walu *Siwa *sa-puluq?
did not exist, at all, when the 'ancestral' language was actually being spoken.

If the PAn numbers did exist way back then, then comparative linguists, following their arcane rules, would have to call the Ilongot number word combinations 'innovations' (ie new inventions), as indeed, they do.

The continued existence of the 'aberrant' Ilongot system proves that it is not just a few obscure and primitive New Guineans who didn't learn their new Austronesian numbers properly, but a previous stage of language development that has only been suppressed by massive population movements and growth in the WMP area during the past two millenia.

Update (5/12/07) I have since seen a fuller Ilongot number-word list, that includes the teens and decades. It shows what I consider an earlier system overlaid with loanwords from neighbours.