talningar
Talningar denotes the practice of counting and enumerating quantities within cultural, linguistic, and mathematical contexts. The term appears in a limited set of Scandinavian scholarly works to describe both the cognitive process of counting and the social practices surrounding it, such as record‑keeping, exchange, and ritual inventories. In contemporary technical literature, the term is uncommon, with more widespread usage of räkning, beräkning, or numeration.
Origin and scope: Talningar is derived from tal, the Swedish word for number, with the nominalizing suffix
Applications and methods: The concept encompasses ways people count and represent numbers, including:
- Studying numeral vocabularies and their semantic structure
- Examining counting devices and tallying methods (tally sticks, knuckle systems)
- Describing oral and written counting traditions, from simple one‑to‑one counts to positional numeral systems
- Analyzing social functions such as taxation, census, and ritual enumeration
In scholarship, talningar is used to analyse how counting shapes social organization and language, rather than