SC: The title ‘Reckonings’ invokes the triple meaning of the word ‘reckon’ - to calculate, to think, and to judge - which parallels the three parts of the subtitle: “Numerals, Cognition, and History.” Reckoning is not mathematics, in its technical, disciplinary sense, but it reflects the everyday practices of working with and manipulating numbers. Related Sequoyah and the Almost-Forgotten History of Cherokee Numerals Can you explain the significance of the watch and why you chose the title “Reckonings” in the first place? What were you trying to get across to potential readers with that evocative word? PL: You had the cover image and title for this book in your head for years. Because there is a significant and large literature on numerical cognition, the comparative, historical data I bring to the table is useful for testing and expanding on our knowledge in that interdisciplinary area. These questions can be as simple as “Do people say ‘two thousand twenty one’ or ‘twenty twenty one’?” and as big as “Were numbers first visual marks or spoken words?” As a linguist and an anthropologist, that’s very attractive.

We can tell, roughly, when and where they originate and how they relate to one another.Īlso, every user of a numerical notation system is also a speaker of one or more languages, which lets us ask great questions comparing number words to numerical notation and to show how they interact. While, of course, the historical and archaeological records are partial (which is in turn both exciting and frustrating), understanding their history and cross-cultural transmission is a tractable problem. Numbers are a ubiquitous domain of human existence, and written numerals are virtually everywhere that there is writing.

We have evidence from over 100 different systems used across every inhabited continent over 5,000 years, including all the world’s literate traditions. What brought me to numerical notation as a dissertation subject is much of what still appeals to me about it now. But that was exactly the sort of creative project that it was possible to do at McGill at that time, and that sadly, given the exigencies of the modern job market, is almost impossible to imagine doing today. It was an unorthodox project for an anthropology department - neither strictly archaeological nor ethnohistorical nor ethnographic. This resulted in my dissertation, which later became my first book, “ Numerical Notation: A Comparative History” (Cambridge, 2010). After moving away from the subject for a couple years, I came back to it when I was looking for a PhD topic along with my advisor, the late Bruce Trigger at McGill. Stephen Chrisomalis: I first became interested in numerals when I wrote a paper in an undergraduate cognitive anthropology course in the mid-1990s. What sparked your interest in this topic? Why are numerals an important area of research? Philip Laughlin: We’ve worked with a number of linguists and anthropologists over the years but you are our first author to specialize in written numerical systems. Drawing on, and expanding upon, the enormous cross-cultural and comparative literatures in linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the history of science that bear on questions of numeracy, he shows that numeracy is a social practice.Ĭhrisomalis took time out from a busy end to the spring semester to field a few questions about his new book, his spirited defense of Roman numerals, his complicated relationships with mathematicians, and his thoughts on the validity of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In “Reckonings,” Chrisomalis considers how humans past and present have used numerals, reinterpreting historical and archaeological representations of numerical notation and exploring the implications of why we write numbers with figures rather than words. Thousands more ways of speaking numbers, manipulating physical objects, and using human bodies to enumerate are known to exist, or to have existed, he writes in his new book “ Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History.” Remarkably, each of the basic structures was invented multiple times independently of one another. Over the past 5,500 years, more than 100 distinct ways of writing numbers have been developed and used by numerate societies, linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis has found. Stephen Chrisomalis is the author of “ Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History.”