who is related to whom — on the numerals three and two in twenty-seven languages
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
The forms come from the translation sections of Wiktionary, checked 4 August 2026; where the script is absent from this sheet’s font, its own romanisation is printed.
Of the nineteen Indo-European languages on this sheet, sixteen say «three» with a word that begins in t- or d- and carries an r right behind it. None of the eight languages from other families does. The second word, «two», repeats the same division — one matching word would be coincidence, two is not.
The three exceptions are relatives as well: Hindi tīn, Persian se, Armenian erekʻ. Kinship is under no obligation to stay visible: sounds shift by rule, and after thousands of years not one letter of the common root need survive.
The converse also holds: Basque hiru sits in the middle of Europe, carries the same r — and has no relatives anywhere. It is a language isolate. Resemblance by ear proves nothing; what proves kinship is a system of correspondences, in which matches never come one at a time.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 6 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
