this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Man and here I thought the English system was kinda screwy, where at first it's in base 12 and base 20 at the same time what with having special unique names for all digits up to twelve, and then thirteen through nineteen are also uniquely weird, then at twenty we decide "man fuck that" and then it's in base 10 until we repeat that pattern every 100, ie "one hundred seventeen." Or then we occasionally do stupid things like "seventeen hundred" instead of "one thousand seven hundred."
It just now hit me that "teenager" is an inherently English construct because that weird partial second decade we have. I'm curious, how does that work in languages? Like, in French they have special words up to 16 and only do "ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine." You spend seven years as a teenager in England but only three in France.
Germanic languages share this. German has neun, zehn, elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn...
But continues after that. Apart from 11 and 12 the german system is consistent within itself, even if the system itself is kinda weird, English less so.
Edit: What i meant is the difference between ten/teen, whereas German uses zehn ("ten") to build the "compount numbers". There is also thir-teen as opposed to three-ten, which isn't quite what eleven and twelve are, but it's also not the same as the numbers following it. But others have pointed out that these are pretty marginal differences and i would agree.
We say dreizehn (three-ten) but dreiundzwanzig (three-and-twenty), so it's not consistent for the same range of numbers as English. But it's a bit more consistent because at least we don't make up new words for 13-19 ("thir", "teen").
Literally every single point listed by @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works applies 100% identically to German. Could you explain how English is less consistent than German?
Literally only because of "teen/ten" difference. Everything else matches up, except that the roles of the cardinal stem (three) and the ordinal stem (thir) are swapped in 13 and 30 for German
Three, thirteen, thirty, third vs Drei, Dreizehn, Dreißig, Dritte
Used 3 as an example because it's the most irregular out of the 9 non-zero digits in German
English has four-teen fif-teen etc. up until twenty and from that point forward has the decade in front of the single number twenty-one. In contrast to German which at least Always has the single digit in front of the decade
To be fair English has a lot of German. The "teen" sound almost certainly comes from the sound "zehn". It's pretty easy to hear how fünfzehn und sechszehn eventually become fifteen and sixteen. We're more or less saying five ten just kinda mushed together.
More accurately, modern English and German come from the same root. A Proto-Germanic word for 15 developed into "fünfzehn" in German and "fifteen" in English.
🤯 Didn't notice that one! Yes, that's indeed more irregular in English!
It's fascinating how our number systems even evolved. They've done studies with remote Amazon tribespeople where they show them a number of dots and ask them how many there are, and found that their words for what we thought were their numbers 1-5 actually translate to more like 1, 2, 3, '4-ish' and 'many'. Interestingly when they've done the same with very young children then they've got similar results.
Counting is something that only took off when large-scale civilisations (and the need to pay taxes!) took off - before this there was never really a need to be specific when counting a quantity of more than about 4 or 5. Maths developed as an offshoot of language rather than something distinct and so our counting systems suffer from the quirks that come with this.
In Finnish, the numbers 11–19 are (the number for 1–9) + “toista”, lit. “of the second (ten)”. So 11 is yksitoista, “one of the second (ten)”. That system is only used for 11–19. Bigger than that is tens + number, e.g. 21 kaksikymmentä yksi (two tens and one).
The Finnish word for “teen” is “teini”, which is a loanword from English. The native word for a person that’s not a child nor an adult is “nuori” lit. “a young”.
Japanese is 1 (ichi), 2 (ni), ...,10 (juu), 10+1 (juu-ichi), 10+2 (juu-ni), ..., 21 (ni-juu-ichi)..., 92 (kyu-juu-ni)..., 100 (hyaku)
Yeah, the numbers look all nice and orderly in the abstract until you need to use them for something in the real world...
In my language(Romanian), the numbers between 11 and 19 are onetoten,(unsprezece) twototen(doisprezece) ... Ninetoten(nouasprezece)
There are 3 exceptions: for 11 instead of unusprezece(onetoten) its unsprezece(un/o is used when saying that there is only one of something, but unu is used when counting), for 14 instead of patrusprezece(fourtoten) its paisprezece and instead of sasesprezece(sixtoten) its saisprezece
In Czech, we say náctiletý but that applies to 11 (jedenáct) through 19 (devatenáct)
Both are acceptable, though. Such-and-such hundred is just a little faster to say.
In Swedish the numbers from 13-19 work similarly. We just add "ton" instead of teen. Teenagers called tonåringar (ton-agers).
TIL a little about Swedish.
I wonder if Swedish and English number words share a history, because I can imagine it started as "three ten" which gets crunched to "thr-t'n" and then properified into "thirteen."
They're both Germanic languages, just like Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish and a few others. Same origin. All of them have variations of tre/dre/drei/thir/þre/þrēo (say them with sounds halfway between t and d as the first sound, and you'll see how similar they are) followed by variations of ten/teen/tin/tan/ton/tien/zehn as a suffix for ten (again, pick a halfway point between t and z and it's easier to see how similar they are).
In Old English it was þrēotīene ( þ is "th"), and in Old Norse it was þrettán, same as modern Icelandic, so the first common root is even further back, but you can see the similarity. The *hypothesized proto-Germanic root is þritehun. (þriz + tehun.
But, it goes back even further than that. The Romance languages (tres, trois etc) shares the same proto-Indo-European root (hypothesized to be tréyes) for three with proto-Germanic.
The names for numbers are ancient, and though not always recognisable, sometimes recognizable variants pop up even further away than you'd expect. E.g. Pashto (Southeastern Iran) has dre for three, Sanskrit has trí, Indonesian has tri, all of them descendants of the same proto-Indo-European root.
At 40 I still get confused when people say shit like 12 - hundred and 16. I'm like... Is that 12 groups of 100? Is that a 12 with 000 after?
1 thousand, 2 hundred and 16.
But I wasn't ever a math major or anything.
Even as I typed it, it made sense. But to throw it into a conversation. Makes me less certain.
The more formal way of writing it (one thousand, two hundred and sixteen) is definitely more clear. But if it helps to remember the more colloquial way (twelve hundred): twelve hundred is a 12 followed by 2 zeros, just like one hundred is a 1 followed by 2 zeros.
Flight school beat "twelve hundred" out of me.