Conant and Williams For about a century, the idea that Māori counted by elevens was best known from its mention in the writing of the American mathematician
Levi Leonard Conant. He identified it as a "mistake" originating with a 19th-century dictionary of the New Zealand language published by the Rev.
William Williams, at the time Archdeacon of
Waiapu. "Many years ago a statement appeared which at once attracted attention and awakened curiosity. It was to the effect that the Maoris, the aboriginal inhabitants of New Zealand, used as the basis of their numeral system the number 11; and that the system was quite extensively developed, having simple words for 121 and 1331, i.e. for the square and cube of 11."
Lesson and Blosseville In 2020, an earlier, Continental origin of the idea the Māori counted by elevens was traced to the published writings of two 19th-century scientific explorers,
René Primevère Lesson and
Jules de Blosseville. They had visited New Zealand in 1824 as part of the 1822–1825 circumnavigational voyage of the
Coquille, a French
corvette commanded by
Louis Isidore Duperrey and seconded by
Jules Dumont d'Urville. On his return to France in 1825, Lesson published his French translation of an article written by the German botanist
Adelbert von Chamisso. At von Chamisso's claim that the New Zealand number system was based on twenty (
vigesimal), Lesson inserted a footnote to mark an error: Von Chamisso's text, as translated by Lesson: "...de l'E. de la mer du Sud ... c'est là qu'on trouve premierement le système arithmétique fondé sur un échelle de vingt, comme dans la Nouvelle-Zélande (2)..." In the same 1821 publication, von Chamisso also identified the Māori number system as decimal, noting the source of the confusion was the Polynesian practice of counting things by pairs, where each pair was counted as a single unit, so that ten units were numerically equivalent to twenty: The language has now been opened to us, and we correct our opinion." sent accounts of their alleged discovery of elevens-based counting in New Zealand to their contemporaries. and the Hungarian astronomer
Franz Xaver von Zach, who briefly mentioned the alleged discovery as part of a letter from Blosseville he had received through a third party. De Blosseville also mentioned it to the Scottish author
George Lillie Craik, who reported this letter in his 1830 book
The New Zealanders. Lesson was also likely the author of an undated essay, written by a Frenchman but otherwise anonymous, found among and published with the papers of the Prussian linguist
Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1839. The story expanded in its retelling: This method of counting set aside every tenth item to mark ten of the counted items; the items set aside were subsequently counted in the same way, with every tenth item now marking a hundred (second round), thousand (third round), ten thousand items (fourth round), and so on. The method of counting also solves another mystery: why the Hawaiian word for
twenty,
iwakalua, means "nine and two." When the counting method was used with pairs, nine pairs were counted (18) and the last pair (2) was set aside for the next round. ==Alleged use by the Pañgwa==