We’re going on seven months since
the last time I did one of these. How appropriate.
As a word, seven comes from the Old English seofon, which in spite of the f was
pronounced pretty much the same way. It
comes from the Proto
Germanic sebum and Proto Indo European septm, which also meant seven in spite
of the fact that a b and a p are very obviously not a v or an f. No idea why
they changed. They just did, and you can see it in words like September, not to
mention the replacement of the s with an h in the prefix hepta- (you can thank
Greek for that).
As for the numeral, the earliest
version is the Brahmi version,
which actually looks quite similar to our seven. In Hindu it looked a lot more like a 6 lying on its back, and then the Arabic
version is like a v. When the numeral system migrated to Europe, a lot of
different places used different versions of numbers, so it could look like a v
or y a 7 depending on where you were. Which makes sense. It’s not like they
were constantly connected to the internet back then. Places could go years or
decades without interacting with each other. Who would have thought to standardize
anything?
Sources
Tony Jebson’s
page on the Origins of
Old English
