Hundred
The Centum/Satem Divide
No word in Indo-European linguistics carries more classificatory weight. When linguists in the nineteenth century sorted the IE language family into two great branches, they named them after this single word: *centum* (Latin) and *satem* (Avestan). The division marks how each branch treated the palatal velar *ḱ* at the head of *\*ḱm̥tóm*.
In the centum languages — the western and southern branches — *ḱ* merged with the plain velar *k* and was preserved as a stop:
- Latin: *centum* (whence French *cent*, Spanish *ciento*, Italian *cento*) - Greek: *hekaton* (ἑκατόν) — the *he-* prefix being an augment, the root still *ḱm̥t* - Proto-Germanic: *hundą* → Old English *hund*, Gothic *hund*, Old Norse *hundrað* - Celtic: Old Irish *cét*, Welsh *cant*, Gaulish *canto-* - Tocharian: *känt* (Tocharian A), demonstrating the centum character of that easternmost branch
In the satem languages — the eastern and northern branches — *ḱ* shifted forward, producing a sibilant:
- Sanskrit: *śatám* (शतम्) — Bopp himself placed this form at the centre of his comparative grammar - Avestan: *satəm* — the very word that gave the branch its name - Lithuanian: *šimtas* - Old Church Slavonic: *sŭto*, Russian *sto* (сто) - Albanian: *qind* (with its own later developments)
The isogloss is not a clean genealogical split — it is a contact phenomenon, a wave of palatalization that swept eastward through the family after the initial dispersal, leaving the western branches untouched. Modern scholarship treats centum/satem as an areal feature rather than a primary clade, but the terminology holds.
English Has Two Copies
English inherited the Germanic form and then, through Latin contact, acquired a second version of the same root. The result: two distinct families of words from one PIE etymon.
The Germanic stream gives *hundred* itself. Old English had *hund* for the base concept; the full form *hundred* compounds *hund* with *-red*, from Proto-Germanic *\*raþjō* — meaning "reckoning" or "account." This *\*raþjō* is cognate with Old English *rǣdan*, "to advise, interpret, read," and with the modern verb *read*. To count hundreds was, in early Germanic, to make a reckoning by hundreds. The same *\*raþjō* appears in *kindred* (*cynn* + *rǣden*, "kin-reckoning") and in the administrative unit called the *hundred* in Anglo-Saxon law — a district assessed at roughly a hundred households or hides.
The Latin stream enters through Norman French and clerical Latin, giving English: - *century* — a span of a hundred years, or a Roman military unit of (nominally) a hundred men - *cent* — one hundredth of a dollar - *percent* — Latin *per centum*, "by the hundred" - *centenary*, *centennial*, *centurion*, *centimeter*, *centigram* - *centum* itself, used as a technical term in linguistics
The two families sit side by side, native and borrowed, one from Tacitus's Germania and one from Caesar's legions.
Why Numbers Survive
Low numerals — one through ten, and the round numbers built from them — are among the most stable vocabulary items any language carries. They resist borrowing. They resist semantic drift. They are too embedded in daily transaction, too woven into the counting of livestock, harvests, soldiers, and days, to be displaced by a neighbour's word.
Bopp's genius was to see that when Sanskrit *śatám*, Greek *hekaton*, Latin *centum*, and Gothic *hund* all pointed back to the same reconstructed form, the argument for common descent became unanswerable. Numbers were his anchor. They survive conquest, christianization, and creolization in ways that other vocabulary does not. The word for hundred has now been spoken continuously for perhaps six thousand years, mutating in its consonants but constant in its arithmetic.