A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NUMERIC SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH AND HAUSA LANGUAGES

Abstract

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 situation s. 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 numeral s so much t hat the two languages could have common meaning and non - instinctive way of co mmunicating 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 , 1 982). 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.