Ancient japanese numerals

yagosawa_at_gmail.com
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: 29 Jan 2005 18:10:25 -0800

I guess I'm not the only person who after studying korean and seeing
its fairly complete native number system, thought "what happened to
japanese native numbers beyond 10?"
Well, maybe I am, but after googling on the matter, I just found this
page:
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/language/number/ancient_japanese.html
Which's very good and makes me quite nostalgic when I first learnt kana
in the same page some years ago. It's very nice to see how much it has
expanded, and so satisfying to realize how much one has improve.

But, whatever, what I wanted to ask is: is the table on that page
correct? Not that I have any reasons to doub it, but it kinda doesn't
make sense to me that 20 is "patati" and not something like "patu"
(hence 20th day hatsuka) or 50 being isodi and not itusodi. Also I
always thought that 8 was something like "yapu" (hence the double t in
"yattsu" and after falling in later times into "yau" and the diphtong
closing into "o" 8th day became "youka). It doesn't make any sense that
itsutsu, nanatsu and kokonotsu don't double the consonant, and mittsu,
yottsu , muttsu and yattsu do so. There has to be some other silabe on
the root. Or so I ignorantly believe.

Any clue, please?