On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, John McCarthy wrote:
Chinese also has such words.
And Korean. Korean actually has two different sets of numbers - "Sino-Korean" and "Pure Korean". Which set is used depends on the counting class. Interestingly enough, the greatest pure Korean number is 99. Also in English, you say "two bottles of wine" and "two slices of bread". The word can be omitted, but not replaced with another one. Many languages make a distinction between countable and noncountable objects. For example, in Estonian the grammatical case of "X" in "i buy X" depends on that. If X is countable ("one slice of bread", "a chair"), we use the genitive. If X is uncountable or the amount is unspecified ("bread", "milk", "sugar"), we use the partitive. I think the linguistical roots are actually not very mysterious: if you buy a chair, you are going to own it (thus genitive), if you buy milk, you only buy a part of it, not all the milk in the world. [A similar phenomenon also existed in French, I think.] Helger