While English speakers may talk of infinite possibilities, ancient Australian Aboriginal languages very rarely stretched past number five.

However, a study published today shows that far from being simple, Aboriginal numeral systems “lost and gained” numbers over time.

The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests ancient Australian languages were not “static” as commonly believed and instead responded to the need to create new words.

For the work, lead author Associate Professor Claire Bowern and colleague Kevin Zhou at Yale University in the US, tracked the evolution of modern Indigenous Australian languages.

Dr Bowern, a graduate of the Australian National University, used a database she had compiled over eight years containing more than 750,000 Indigenous words across the 350-400 Indigenous languages spoken in Australia.

The latest study focused on the numeral system limits across the Pama-Nyungan family, which includes almost 70 per cent of Australian languages and covers 90 per cent of the nation’s land mass.

The researchers then used analytical techniques common to evolutionary biology to reconstruct the ancestors of today’s Indigenous languages. More.

See: ABC News

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