I started reading the book "The History of Pi" by Petr Beckmann. I found this conclusion most interesting, in light of the fact that the root idea behind the word שלש is the concept of measurement.
"Man first learned to count to two, and a long time elapsed before he learned to count to higher numbers. There is a fair amount of evidence for this, perhaps none of it more fascinating than that preserved in man's languages: In Czech, until the Middle Ages, there used to be two kinds of plural -- one for two items, another for many (more than two) items, and apparently in Finnish [and Hebrew-ed.note] this is so to this day. There is evidently no connection between the (Germanic) words two and half; these is none in the Romance languages (French: deux and moitie) nor in the Slavic languages (Russian: dva and pol), and in Hungarian, which is not an Indo-European language, the words are ketto and fel. [True also in Hebrew: shnayim and khetzi-ed.note] Yet in all European languages, the words for 3 and 1/3, 4 and 1/4, etc., are related. This suggests that men grasped the concept of a ratio, and the idea of a relation between a number and its reciprocal only after they had learned to count beyond two." (page 19)
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