why is it that in so many languages the word count and recount are the same? In hebrew the word lisaper means to count and to tell someone a story. The same is also true for spanish and french. Is there a specific reason why?
-yafa

Nice observation, Yafa!

In English, we can tell a story or tell the numbers of the toll of the dead, all told. And all tolled. It is remarkable, isn't it?

In German, too, numbers are zahlen, and a story is an erzählung, which, as in English, is really the same as a telling.

Part of the answer to your question has to do with the fact that the verbs (and derivatives of these) in the whole of the Indo-European family of languages for telling (counting off) numbers and telling (or recounting) a story, just happened to be the same, originally.

The "count/recount" examples you mentioned are based on a different root, of course, which the Romance languages you cite display, and which English has also borrowed (from Latin, by way of French). These parallels follow the same pattern, and, although the root is different, may be analogically based on the same parallel elsewhere in Indo-European.

This does not explain what happened in Hebrew and other non-Indo-European languages, though, and I have no clue there.

It occurs that maybe ancient story-tellers from all sorts of different cultures used strings of beads or some such thing which they "told" off in one sense in order to keep track of their place in the narrative they were at the same time "telling" in another, related sense.

Rosaries seem to have much the same function, now that I think of it, in the modern-day worship of commununicants in the Roman Catholic church.

Intriguing question, Yafa!

[This message was edited by maiku on 12-04-02 at 09:52 PM.]