Watch: Counting sheep — the old-fashioned way

Shepherds in England’s Lake District have their own ancient number system for counting sheep

by GrrlScientist for The Guardian | @GrrlScientist

Yan Herdwick ewe. (Credit: hollidaypics / CC BY 2.0.)

Today’s video discusses several themes that I love — language, numbers and animals. In this case, we are learning about counting using the ancient Brythonic Celtic languages, which is a group of languages spoken before the Romans invaded the British Isles. Even though this counting system has fallen out of favour in many places, the so-called “Yan Tan Tethera” system is still in use in some parts of northern England to count sheep. Basically, as shepherds counted their animals, they kept a running tally by adding a stone to one pocket for each group of twenty sheep counted.

(‘Lakeland Words’, 1898)

How different is this counting system from the one we’re familiar with? First, it is a base 20 system. Second, it uses old names for numbers, like dik, figgit and bumfit, that give modern English-speaking children (of all ages) fits of giggles:

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I am surprised to learn that even though I grew up in rural northwestern America, this “nonsense” rhyme that I learned as a child (using slightly different words), has one of the Brythonic counting systems as its origin:

eena deena dina dos
catler, weena, weina, woss
spit spat must be done
twiddle’em, twoddle’em twenty one
O.U.T spells ‘out’
so out you must go

Which version of this counting rhyme did you learn as a child?

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Originally published at The Guardian on 27 December 2011.