this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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(TLDR: last two paragraphs)
one of the best nonfiction books I've read was A Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah. It goes through the history of numerical writing from scratching notches on a bone to keep track of livestock all the way to the computer age, highly recommend it.
in it, it goes through counting systems around the world (including using your body, apparently not all cultures always used just fingers to count things) and somewhere around there the topic comes to the intuitive counting that exists in us.
turns out we can count to 4 in an instant. if I flash a single frame of up to 4 objects on a screen, you can reliably tell me how many there were even if you weren't expecting it. from 5 objects on it becomes more confusing, and even if you can do it it's usually due to grouping (maybe you realize there was a group of 3 objects and a group of 2 objects and do the math in your head later).
anyway this apparently means that even the most primitive counting systems to have at least 2 and up to 4 number words, followed by "many" for 5 and above. but even for those who have more numbers in vocabulary, 2 and up to 4 as a quantity seems to be more significant than anything above. for example a lot of languages have singular and plural forms of words but some languages also have dual or even trial forms.
one such indicator of significance was apparently how romans named things and even people. in a group of things they seem to have named the first four with proper names, and used numbers for 5 and above. this includes their children, which is why there were names like octavius, apparently, because that's the eighth child.
so that's what they did with the months. named the first four March, April, May, June, then continued with 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 for the rest. January and February were added later to push each numbered month to 2 off. 5 and 6 were renamed after Julius and Augustus. so now we have 7, 8, 9, 10 as the names for months 9, 10, 11 and 12.
OK but Romans also sometimes just numbered their kids until they got old enough to go from being Primus to getting a descriptive name that was often insulting
yeah maybe they just didn't live long enough to find something insultingly descriptive for the eighth.
The reason for this being that at the beginning of the year, some government officials changed posts, including the ones responsible for the military. March is when the weather becomes nice, so you can go to war again (hence the name). But since March also marked the new year, the people responsible for war management just took office, which was not ideal. So they pushed the two months in to give them some time to prepare before sending out the military everywhere.
Fun times!
that's great to know, thanks for adding! I've known about the two months being inserted at the top for quite a long time but never knew why.
Those who understand German might be interested in this episode of the Troja Alert podcast:
https://trojaalert.bildungsangst.de/podcast/tro030-calendar-gods-2/