Terra dactyls
06 December 2004. Inspired by .
Matt Webb's fingers are mightily impressive. (And yes, I too was sent to St Malo on a school trip, but all I learnt was how easy it is to buy cheap French lager underage.)
The fusball players of St Malo's bars aside, Matt's counting methods remind me of my time in Hong Kong, where I learnt to count to ten on one hand. Although not very expressive with their hands, Chinese people would always make the symbol for a number while saying it, often sub-consciously. The numbers I learnt were a bit like these, although 8, 9 and 10 were slightly different. By extension, it's easy enough to count to 100 using both hands to represent digits.
But that's nothing. The Chinese had an ancient manual counting system which seems to rely on memory as much as finger position - or incredible manual dexterity - but it got up to 100,000. As ever, the Venerable Bede had his own method, as do the users of Chisenbop, a great name for a kids TV puppet series if ever I heard one. (American Sign language also does one-handed counting, but relies more on the direction your hand is facing.) And in case you were thinking all this is only from the age of woodcuts and engravings, think again.
As well as bequeathing us the metric system, dactylonomy has left an inevitable handprint on certain languages as well.
The same thing occurs in the Innuit language of Greenland, effectively a base-20 system where any number above 20 is "second person first hand".
Aside from all the finger puppetry, this list of Cantonese classifiers is rather fun too, and reminds me of the ever-wonderful Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge.