AN ANALYSIS OF NUMERALS IN IGBO AND GERMAN FOR SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING

Abstract

Numbering as an ancient and very important aspect of expression is manifest in different languages, reflecting the culture and environmental experiences in communicating quantity and positioning, in activities of humans within a given speech environment. This paper is a descriptive study of numbers in German and Igbo languages with the aim of bringing out the conceptual peculiarities, universal experiences and linguistic behaviours in their cardinal and ordinal numbers. Data are collected from primary and secondary sources. Findings show that both languages manipulate basic numbers to account for higher numbers using the arithmetic operations of addition and multiplication. Conversely, the languages differ largely in their formations as they employ different linguistic processes, word order, use of conjuncts and specific syntactic constructs. These features give clues to the conceptual differences in the languages. These observations are harnessed in this paper for effective second language teaching, learning and research. The study concludes that numbering supports the view that language is people and culture specific as it is characterized by the features the users conceive. Common human make-up and experiences, however, give room for a handful of similarities. The paper recommends that teaching L2 from the consciousness of the similarities and differences in L1 will give the learner more room to create a common underlying conceptual base for the two languages, avoiding loss of the uniqueness of less economically relevant languages.