A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NUMERIC SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH AND HAUSA LANGUAGES

CHAPTER ONE

1.1  Introduction

This work is a comparative study of the numeric system of two of the most widely spoken languages not only in Nigeria but Africa and the world as a whole. It is to explain the styles adopted by the speakers of both languages in expressing numeral situations.

In the early days of some comparison between languages, some scholars had argued that there was such a strong linguistic affinity between Hausa and English numerals so much that the two languages could have common meaning and non- instinctive way of communicating ideas, emotion and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols. This is because any language is fundamentally a series of sounds which become meaningful only when those sounds are grouped together in certain definite arrangements (Olaye, 1982). Besides, just as languages must name things and talk about them, virtually all human languages (English and Hausa inclusive) count things. By this token, numeration is somewhat a universal phenomenon.

Both English and Hausa languages may need little or no introduction because they are both languages of wider communication.

1.2                 Statement of the Problem

Given the nature of their numeral comparison, it is good to look at their linguistic affiliation. Hausa is a Chadic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The Bole-Tongale Angas and Ron groups of the west Chadic languages represent the closest relative of Hausa. While English language really started with arrival of three German languages. In that numbers and counting have become an integral part of English and Hausa everyday life especially when we take into account, in the modern computer. These words you are reading have been recorded on a computer using a code of ones and zeros.

It is an interesting story how those digits have come to dominate our word. Presently, the earliest known archeological evidence of any form of writing or counting are scratch marks on a bone from 150,000 years ago. But the first really evidence of counting in the first form of the numbers from twenty thousand years ago. An Ishango bone was found in the Congo with two identical marking of sixty scratches each an equally numbered group on the back. These Markings are certain education of counting and they mark defining moment in a western civilization. In present day, counting we learn about cardinal and ordinal numbers followed by grammar rules and animal names and that of conversation in Hausa.