In the 2019 edition of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, Jonathan Liew traced the history the three-figure score in cricket – perhaps the game’s most celebrated feat.
In his 1977 book The Domestication of the Savage Mind, the anthropologist Jack Goody visits the LoDagaa people of northern Ghana, who possess a unique system of counting. While large items such as cows are numbered singly, smaller items – particularly the cowrie shells that are used as common currency – are not. The locals first take a handful of three, then of two, and make a pile of five. Four piles of five make 20, and five piles of 20 make 100. When Goody asks the LoDagaa how they count, he is met with bafflement. “Count what?”
In other societies, numbers are tied to objects. In some of the Fijian islands, ten is bola when describing boats, boro when describing coconuts. The Tsimshians of north-west Canada have different words for three: gulal for men, galtskan for trees, guant for garments. And the Nivkh of Sakhalin Island in eastern Russia have over 30 classes o fnumber, each pertaining to an – often maritime-themed – object. The number five could be thory (referring to people), thovr (places), thosk (poles for drying fish), thor (bundles of dried salmon slices), or plenty else.
Meanwhile, there’s an irony in the fact that in 2018, when the ECB were casting around for a shiny gimmick that would distinguish their new shortform competition and simplify the game for a new audience, they settled on The Hundred: 100 balls a side, a scoring system so universally resonant that even the LoDagaa, the Tsimshians or the Nivkh would grasp it. In more than one sense, we may be coming full circle.
