Words under the lens: Greek Numeral names No.14 - Greek words related to number "twelve"

14.    Greek words related to number "twelve":

Greek word DWDEKA means "twelve", and DWDEKATOS means "twelfth", [Divry's Modern English-Greek, Greek-English Dictionary, 1988, p. 762].

Turkish cardinal numeral for "twelve" is 
"ONIKI" and for ordinal numeral "twelfth” is "ONIKINCI". 

a)    In my earlier explanation of DEU, DUO, DW meaning "two",  I showed that these Greek cardinal numeral names were cross named from Turkish cardinal numeral name 
"IKI" meaning "two" - as used in other "two" related expressions.  Similarly, I showed above that the Greek numeral DEKA was also cross named from Turkish numeral ON as used in much longer Greek expressions. Thus, the Greek numeral name DWDEKA is actually from Turkish "ON + IKI" or "IKI + ON" (ONIKI), that is, (2 + 10) or (10 + 2) = 12.  On the surface, Greek name DWDEKA bears no resemblance to Turkish cardinal numeral ONIKI - because of the cross-naming of DEU, DUO, DW and the cross naming of Greek name DEKA from Turkish numerals IKI and ON respectively.

b)   In order to understand the makeup of this Greek term DWDEKA (meaning "twelve") better, we should also examine the Greek term  DWDEKATEMORION, meaning "twelfth part", [Divry's Modern English-Greek, Greek-English Dictionary, 1988, p. 484].


The Greek word DWDEKATEMORION, rearranged letter-by-letter as "ON-ARTI-EKEMDUDU-O", is the altered, restructured and Hellenized form of the Turkish mathematical expression 
"ON ARTI IKIMCUDU O" ("ON ARTI IKINCIDI O"), that is, "ONIKINCIDI O" meaning "it is the twelfth".  The Turkish mathematical expression "ON ARTI IKI"  means "10 plus 2", which is another way of saying ONIKI - meaning "twelve" in Turkish.  We must note that the Greek term DWDEKATOS meaning 12th is only a part of this Greek term DWDEKATEMORION. So the Greek ordinal numeral name DWDEKATOS is a further shortened and Hellenized form of the word DWDEKATEMORION that was made-up from Turkish expression "ON ARTI IKINCUDU O".

From these explanations, we can see that the ordinal numeral DWDEKATOS meaning "twelfth" is also made up from Turkish mathematical expression 
"ON + IKINCI" or "IKI + ONINCI" meaning "twelfth". 

Clearly, to come up with this Greek word DWDEKATEMORION, Greek linguists have used the Turkish numeral names 
ON (ten) and IKI (two) plus the terms ARTI (plus), -INCI (th) -DI (is) and O (it) in a Turkish expression first and then they have altered, restructured and Hellenized the resulting new word. Unquestionably, "linguistic engineering" has been used in building this word and countless other Greek words.  Although, it was very cleverly done, it was all based on deceit and stealing everything from Turkish while denying that Turkish was the most ancient father/mother language of them all.


Polat Kaya

29/05/2011