In quite a few languages, the word for ‘twenty’ is derived from a word meaning ‘person’ or ‘body’. The logic runs like this: 5 is ‘a hand’, 10 is ‘two hands’, 15 is ‘both hands and a foot’, and 20 is ‘all hands and feet’ – in other words, all the digits of our bodies.
Also in quite a few languages, the word used to designate both the language itself and its speakers literally means ‘person’ or ‘people’ or ‘real people’. The Yami of Taiwan, for instance, call themselves Tao or ‘people’, and their language ciriciring no tao, ‘speech of people’.
If a significant number of languages use ‘person’ for ‘twenty’ and ‘persons’ or ‘people’ for the language itself and its speakers, it stands to reason that some of them call themselves something like ‘twenty’. And so they do. I happened upon three of them in the span of just a few days.
The neatest case is found on the Philippine island of Luzon: in Arta, one word for ‘20’ is arta. (There’s another one that translates simply as ‘two tens’, not unlike our ‘twenty’.) The Arta language is falling out of use today, and earlier this century, there must have been a moment when there were exactly 20 Arta speakers left. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic.
In the Indonesian part of New Guinea, there’s a people and a language called Aghu. Their word for ‘twenty’ is aghu-bigi, where bigi means ‘full-length, complete’.
And then there’s Iñupiaq, spoken in Alaska. Iñuk (plural: iñuit) means ‘person’, while piaq means ‘real’. And what’s the word for ‘twenty’? Iñuiññaq. The –ñaq part, again, stands for ‘complete’.
Theoretically, the speakers of Arta, Aghu and Iñupiaq might call the year 2024 ‘person-person-four’. I’m pretty sure they don’t, but it tickles me just to think that they could.