Jako Jan jechał samotrzeć przez las półczwarta dnia - czyli o dawnych sposobach wyrażania relacji ilościowych

Abstract

A comparison of old and present indexes for quantitative assessment shows very significant lexical and formal differences. A quantification manner, inherited from the Proto-Slavic language, was unstable and multidimensional, which was apparent in Old Polish texts, whose old complex structures already had a synthesized form, but nevertheless, their inflections still revealed a primary structure. Lack of formal stabilization, which was still noticeable in the Middle Polish period, made numerals and numerical structures directly reflect mathematical operations they had been founded upon. Complex numerical structures often expressed arithmetical operations explicite: 1) addition, e.g. thirty and five, two and twenty, 2) subtraction, e.g. a hundred without one, 3) multiplication, e.g. three-fold one hundred thousand. An essential feature of such structures was stimulation of utterance recipient’s mental activity. One-word numerals in a form of composites, which were constructed on a basis of a mechanism of subtraction, i.e. collective numerals like samotrzeć ‘one in a group of three’, and partitive like półczwarta ‘four minus half, enforced similar behavior. Disappearance of the above mentioned structures and lexemes occurred in New Polish period in result of numerous linguistic tendencies, among which the most vital trend in the history of a language was communication improvement and reduction of mental activity to a necessary minimum, as well as in effect of a tendency to simplify a system. Only the items that directly determine a sequence of numbers in an arithmetic system have remained in the Polish language from a formally and formatively varied class of lexemes naming numbers, i.e. cardinal numbers have specialized as numerical quantifiers supported only residually by collective numbers with greatly restricted context.