Reviews for Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers - Karl Menninger - Paperback

The average rating for Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers - Karl Menninger - Paperback based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-14 00:00:00 William Ramos If you're one of those people suffering from apophenia, who delight in finding patterns in things, especially numbers, than this volume, latter-day (and wackily sympathetic) kabbalists and numerologists, you'd probably love this book. Conversely, lovers of more precise--I hesitate to use the word 'real', but, fuck it--'real' sciences, like math and linguistics, will also love this book. For me, a layman, or, ahem, layperson it was tangentially interesting in both the latter senses. Math-wise, you get an immense and obsessive, almost fanatical, exploration of the inherent logic of numbers, where numbers came from, how we think of numbers, ways of counting--all sorts of weird stuff you'd never considered about a basic fundament of our lives. Language-wise, you get even more fanatical delvings-into of cognates, word origin, word sense, 'hidden' numbers, and all that. A little too detailed for my tastes to the point of drudgery, but in an overall sense, satisfying in the way that the Cliff Notes to 'Finnegan's Wake' might be, with the same, muted sense of achievement.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-29 00:00:00 Barbara Benoy Karl Menninger seemed like a very interesting person to me, based on him being mentioned in Joan Didion's Blue Nights, except it wasn't for this book, it was for Man Against Himself. 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.