Complexity counts: global and local perspectives on Indo-Aryan numeral systems

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the unusual complexity of Indo-Aryan numeral systems, quantifies their intricacy using cross-linguistic metrics, and explores cultural factors influencing their persistence and variation.

Contribution

It introduces new metrics for measuring numeral system complexity and provides a cross-linguistic analysis of Indo-Aryan languages' numeral systems and their underlying factors.

Findings

Indo-Aryan languages have more complex numeral systems than most languages.

Individual Indo-Aryan languages vary significantly in their numeral complexity.

Despite high complexity, Indo-Aryan systems follow general efficiency pressures.

Abstract

The numeral systems of Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali are highly unusual in that unlike most numeral systems (e.g., those of English, Chinese, etc.), forms referring to 1--99 are highly non-transparent and cannot be constructed using straightforward rules for forming combinations of tens and digits. As an example, Hindi/Urdu {\it iky\=anve} `91' is not decomposable into the composite elements {\it ek} `one' and {\it nave} `ninety' in the way that its English counterpart is. This paper further clarifies the position of Indo-Aryan languages within the typology of numeral systems, and explores the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that may be responsible for the persistence of complex systems in these languages. Using data from multiple databases, we develop and employ a number of cross-linguistically applicable metrics to quantify the complexity of languages' numeral systems, and demonstrate that Indo-Aryan languages have decisively more complex numeral systems than the world's languages as a whole, though individual Indo-Aryan languages differ from each other in terms of the complexity of the patterns they display. We investigate the factors (e.g., religion, geographic isolation, etc.) that underlie complexity in numeral systems, with a focus on South Asia, in an attempt to develop an account of why complex numeral systems developed and persisted in certain Indo-Aryan languages but not elsewhere. Finally, we demonstrate that Indo-Aryan numeral systems adhere to certain general pressures toward efficient communication found cross-linguistically, despite their high complexity. We call for this somewhat overlooked dimension of complexity to be taken seriously when discussing general variation in numeral systems.