Finger counting

Finger counting, or dactylonomy, is the art of counting along one's fingers. Though marginalized in modern societies by Arabic numerals, formerly different systems flourished in many cultures,^[1][2] including educated methods far more sophisticated than the one-by-one finger count taught today in preschool education.

Finger counting can also serve as a form of manual communication, particularly in marketplace trading and also in games such as morra.

Finger counting is studied by ethnomathematics.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Counting gestures

• Finger binary
• Chisanbop
• Tally marks
• Prehistoric numerals
• Colombian numerals
• Chinese number gestures

Notes

1. ^ Georges Ifrah notes that humans learned to count on their hands. Ifrah shows, for example, a picture of Boethius (who lived 480–524 or 525) reckoning on his fingers in Ifrah 2000, p. 48.
2. ^ Otto E. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952; 2nd edition, Brown University Press, 1957; reprint, New York: Dover publications, 1969; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993 ISBN 1-56619-269-2 p.9, notes that as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, in Egypt's Old Kingdom, in the Pyramid texts' "Spell for obtaining a ferry-boat", the ferryman might object "Did you bring me a man who cannot number his fingers?". This spell was needed to cross a canal of the nether-world, as detailed in the Book of the Dead.

References

• Ifrah, Georges (2000), The Universal History of Numbers: From prehistory to the invention of the computer., John Wiley and Sons, p. p. 48, ISBN 0-471-39340-1 . Translated from the French by David Bellos, E.F. Harding, Sophie Wood and Ian Monk. Ifrah supports his thesis by quoting idiomatic phrases from languages across the entire world.

External links

counting in American Sign Language

Further reading

• The Universal History of Numbers, Georges Ifrah

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