etymology - Is there a Germanic word for the Latin "number"?

Really just a curiosity, but I've been unable to find such a thing on my own...

I figure something as simple as a word for the thing you count with should exist in any language which has terms for counting. It's definitely possible we had no such thing ourselves, and had to borrow the term.

My knowledge of other Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faroese, and Dutch mostly) only includes cognates of "number". If we were using a Germanic word before, does anyone know what it was?

Answer

I think the word that English used before borrowing number from Latin/French was probably tale. I couldn't confirm this directly with etymological online sources, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence.

German Zahl, Dutch getal and Danish tal together with German/Dutch/Danish Anzahl/aantaal/antal and Nummer/nummer/nummer cover most or perhaps all uses of English number. Zahl/getal/tal is the most basic meaning; the other words can and must be used for certain special uses:

The number of numbers under 6 is five. Number 5.

Die Anzahl Zahlen unter 6 ist fünf. Nummer 5.

Het aantal getallen minder dan 6 is vijf. Nummer 5.

Antallet af tal under 6 er fem. Nummer 5.

The telling of a story is related to counting in that you say one event, or number, after another, in the correct order. That's why you can "recount" a story (or give an "account" of it), and that's why the words for counting and telling a story are related in the Germanic languages other than English.

I am counting my sheep. I am telling a story.

Ich zähle meine Schafe. Ich erzähle eine Geschichte.

Ik tel mijn schapen. Ik vertel een verhaal.

Jeg tæller mine får. Jeg fortæller en historie.

In English, the counting sense of tell has mostly been superseded by the story-telling sense and replaced by Latin words, but traces of it survive e.g. in tally as a synonym for reckoning or account and in teller as a word for someone for whom counting money (rather than telling stories) is part of the job description.

The etymonline articles on tell and tale are relevant. In particular, etymonline says this about tale:

The secondary Modern English sense of "number, numerical reckoning" (c. 1200) probably was the primary one in Germanic [...].

(I was a bit puzzled by what appears to be an implicit claim that tale has a numerical secondary sense in Modern English. But TimLymington cleared this up with a comment quoting Chambers with the archaic phrase "a tale of years".)

I don't know if this answers your question in the title with a yes or no because it's not entirely clear whether you are looking for a word in Proto-Germanic (which apparently would be talo) or for a modern English word of Germanic origin. The latter doesn't seem to exist because the number sense of the word tale itself was lost completely in English, in favour of number, unlike the other Germanic languages that evolved a differentiation of meaning between the cognates of tale and the cognates of number that essentially puts the former into a mathematical context and the latter into a numerical naming context.