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Native American Number Counting Rhyme

So far, we have gotten five separate queries about a list of counting words supposedly from an American Indian language. Though the words do not bear any resemblance to any Native American language we know of, they do bear an interesting resemblance to each other. Here they are in the five versions that were sent to us (collected in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky-- all from white Americans who were "taught how to count in Indian" as children in the early 1900's):

Number	Pennsylvania	Indiana	Alabama	Arkansas	Kentucky	Texas
1	nero	hyro	ae-ro	nero	nefo	naro
2	cefo	seepho	cee-fo	ceefo	cefo	seeko
3	cutty	cutalong	cu-ti	cuttycut	cuta-mini	comalong
4	cutmany	cutaminnie	cu-tim	longlong	cuta-maw	longco
5	cutlong	bencherry	lon-go	longmini	lon-go	comanary
6	longmany	cherrywah	du-mi	longco	ju-ben	codi
7	longco	longco	da-mi	comini	ben-mini	doben
8	comany	codaw	jack-a-ben	cotie	mini-maw	benshay
9	cota	doodaw	ben-a-ben	tiemini	maw-mini-maw	cheywa
10	tahmany	minnie	wa-chee	tiechew	chiga	wommanary
11	tayew			chewpin		wahoo
12	jewmany			pinchay
13	gewben			chaymini
14	benmany			chaywha
15	bencha			whamini
16	chamany			whatie
17	chawah			chiglets
18	wahmany
19	watch
20	chiglets

This almost certainly is not the counting system from an actual Native American language. For one thing, there really was not any single Native American language that was natively spoken in all six of those far-flung locations. For another, the numeral systems of Native American languages have been very extensively recorded, and this number set does not match any of the known language families of Native North America. It is possible that the numbers might have come from an African language, since speakers of the same African language were often separated and sent to different states as slaves. A Native American connection is also possible in that case, since African-Americans and Native Americans frequently intermarried. It's also possible that the words came from a fictional source, like the made-up lyrics "hana mana ganda" in Peter Pan or the faux-African lyrics "oo-ee oo-ah-ah ting-tang walla-walla bing-bang" in the song "Witch Doctor."

In my opinion, though, these numbers are probably part of a counting-out rhyme or counting game. If you look at the most complete wordset (from Pennsylvania,) there's a very strong pattern to these words: after 3, every even number ends in "many" (making the words more rhythmic to recite,) and every odd number is a combination of the numbers immediately before and after it, minus the "many." (cutlong = cut + long, longco = long + co, etc.) The odds of that ever happening in the number system of a natural language seem close to zero to me, but it makes total sense as wordplay. Furthermore, the fact that the same word elements are used in all three versions but sometimes refer to different numbers (a variant of cutlong means "three" in one list but "five" in another; the word longco means "five" in two lists but "seven" in two others and "four" in one; the element ben appears at "five" in one list but "fifteen" in another, etc.) It would be very, very unusual for the meaning of a word to change from "three" to "five" over time in a real language! But it's very likely for individual people to just forget some of the words in a rhyme they learned as children. Many of the shorter wordlists, compared with the longest rhyme furthest left on this chart, seem like they might conceivably be somebody's partial recollection of it.

All of this only leads to an even more mystifying question, though: if this is a counting rhyme, where did it come from? It must have been fairly well known since people in five different states sent copies of it to us; yet we we've been unable to find hide nor hair of it online. And except for the rhythm, it doesn't strongly resemble other well-known counting-out rhymes like "eeny, meeny, miney, moe," "intery, mintery, cuttery, corn," "on-ery, or-ery, ick-ery, ann," "hickory, dickory, dock," or (one from my own childhood) "eeny, meeny, pepsameeny, oopah, popsameeny." Neither does it resemble any of the old European counting rhymes of the "yan, tyan, tethera, methera, pimp" or "een, teen, tether, fether, fitz" varieties (which are also often mistaken for American Indian numbers) -- you can see a good list of counting rhymes of Great Britain here. And the only counting-out rhyme we've ever heard of being used specifically by Native Americans is the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot children's rhyme "oni, kibi, lawes, akles, untip."

So in the end, we have some good ideas about where this way of counting didn't come from, but where it did come from, we're still scratching our heads over. If anyone out there knows another version of this count or has some knowledge about its origins, please drop us a line and we'd be glad to add it to this page. The best suggestion we've heard so far is that it might have been created at a summer camp, since children from multiple states might then have brought the rhyme back home with them and taught it to other kids in their neighborhoods.

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