Not to mention shinayim...
I got a little confused here:
1) I didn't see any inconsistency in Klein's statement. It seems to me to say that he is of the opinion that shtayim derives from ashtei (which we see in Hebrew as 'ashtei asar most often).
2) Please explain firstly how exactly the word is vocalised. Is the sheva under the shin na' or nach? How do we know? Is the dagesh in the tav kal or chazak? How do we know?
3) Many words in Hebrew have a dagesh kal after sheva nach. The word "hitpael" has a sheva nach on the tav, and a dagesh kal in the peh.
Joel,
According to Klein, שן tooth, comes from שננ - to sharpen.
1) It's hard to put my finger on it. He says "if it were really so" - as if it maybe isn't. But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
2) The shva is nach, the dagesh is kal. I don't know much about these things, but that what all the sources I've read said. However, I know that some regular readers of this blog understand this much more - perhaps they'll post a comment explaining how we know.
3) What's unique about שתים is that it's the only word where the first letter has a shva nach and then a dagesh kal.
English second, the ordinal number, is as a whole a borrowing from French, unlike first, third, fourth, and the rest, which are obviously native; if it were native, we'd expect *twoth or something like it, like most of the others. The exceptions are easy to understand: the ending -st of first is the superlative ending -est in a reduced form, the same as in last, which is also an ordinal number; the form third is by metathesis from Old English thridda, plainly three + -th.
Why borrow? Old English somehow lost the Germanic ordinal represented by German zweite and Dutch tweede, and used instead other, which also meant what it means in Modern English. Borrowing second from French cleared up the ambiguity.
But in Latin, the source of French second, the word secundus is also entirely unrelated to duo, the cardinal number 'two'. Instead, it is the participle of the verb sequor 'follow'. I was quite surprised when first looking into a Latin New Testament to see the first book called Evangelium secundum Matthæum; not 'the Gospel of the second Matthew', but the 'Gospel according to (following) Matthew'. Apparently Latin had followed the same course as English: losing its native ordinal, then substituting alter 'other', and finally borrowing an ordinal from a different source.
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