Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers

Karl Menninger seemed like a very interesting person to me, based on him being mentioned in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights by Joan Didion, except it wasn’t for this book, it was for Man Against Himself by Karl Menninger. Nonetheless, what interested me was the big difference in topic since this book is about Numbers/Counting and the latter about Self-Mutilation/Suicide.

Well, being someone who deals with numbers at home and at work, I sort of was drawn to this textbook for that reason too. You learn a lot about how as a species we developed numbers from having the need to count and record things, all the way to how we symbolized those recordings for easy interpretations and how we derived words and meaning for those numbers/symbols.

He goes through the history of both the west and the east, but its mostly focused on the west and middle east- with Romans, Vikings, Greek, etc… to Arabs, before he gives a glimpse into China and Asia in general. The dive into language formation was super informative, and you learn A LOT about language and how language came to form alongside how numbers came to form. Without being able to properly count or symbolize numbers, we wouldn’t be where we are today - as a species, we wouldn’t even be able to think the way we now do by default. We owe so much for all the transfer learning set upon us by our ancestors when it came to this.

I think one thing I really wanted to learn was more about the myths behind certain numbers, like the number 13 or 7. There were some unexplored topics there I would have loved for more information on.

Read this if you really love numbers, language, are naturally curious about how we developed those things, and want to better understand how we came to the state we are in today in terms of the culture of numbers, counting numbers and symbolizing numbers.