Evolution of “hundred” in Indo-European languages

by Jakub Marian

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Most Eu­ro­pean lan­guages de­vel­oped from a sin­gle lan­guage called Proto-Indo-Eu­ro­pean, spo­ken ap­prox­i­mately from 4500 BC and 2500 BC some­where in the Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian steppe, at least ac­cord­ing to the most widely ac­cepted hy­poth­e­sis.

Some­what sur­pris­ingly, sim­ple vo­cab­u­lary in most mod­ern Eu­ro­pean lan­guages (such as num­bers, im­me­di­ate fam­ily mem­bers and some an­i­mals) de­vel­oped from a sin­gle word in Proto-Indo-Eu­ro­pean, al­though its cur­rent forms have changed be­yond recog­ni­tion.

His­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics is ca­pa­ble of re­con­struct­ing many such words with great pre­ci­sion. The di­a­gram below shows the de­vel­op­ment of the Proto-Indo-Eu­ro­pean word for “hun­dred”, from its re­con­structed forms in lan­guages that are no longer spo­ken up to the mod­ern forms:

Hundred in European languages

It should be noted that the Al­ban­ian word for njëqind (not shown above) is a bor­row­ing from Latin (lit­er­ally “one + cent”). The Ro­man­ian word sută (also not shown) is likely a Slavic loan­word or pos­si­bly a loan­word from an­other lan­guage.

Let’s ex­plain the no­ta­tion: An as­ter­isk at the be­gin­ning of a word in­di­cates that the word is re­con­structed. There are no writ­ten sources from that era, and the no­ta­tion is a mod­ern in­ven­tion used solely for the pur­pose of re­con­struc­tion.

The ring below “m” in Proto-Indo-Eu­ro­pean means that it is used as a vowel (as in “hmm” in Eng­lish); “k” with an acute ac­cent in­di­cates a “soft k”, sim­i­lar to “k” in “keen”; the ac­cent in “ó” sim­ply means that it is stressed.

In Proto-Ger­manic, “h” is pro­nounced /x/ (as in “Loch Ness”), which should make it eas­ier to un­der­stand the tran­si­tion: /k/ → /x/ → /h/. In Proto-Balto-Slavic, “ś” in­di­cates a soft “sh” (pro­nounced by rais­ing the tongue), hence the de­vel­op­ment “soft k → soft sh”. In Proto-Indo-Iran­ian, “ĉ” in­di­cates a “ch” sound (as in “cheat”).

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