According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more complicated than either Huli or French.
Japanese numerals are quite easy, but when it comes to actually counting things, it is quite complex. There are two series of numeral words that are used in different contexts, as well as dozens of counter words that pair with a variety of semantic categories. Many combinations or number + noun have quite irregular combinations, like "hatachi" (20 years of age) or "hatsuka" (20th day of the month).
It's regular in construction, but the words change and drop parts of the basic number without a particular pattern (as an outsider to the language). "kira" -> "ki" makes sense. "duria" -> "dauni" -> "dau" kind of makes sense, but adds an extra letter (how does the sound actually change?). "tebira" -> "tebone" -> "tebo". A pattern is forming. Drop the "r-" and replace it with an "n-" (except for some) and later drop the "n-".
- quatre-vingt is the name for 80 - dix-sept is the name for 17
so we could also say it's eighty-seventeen.
1. (most complex)
19. French
33. Swiss French
69. (simplest)Before the 1990s there were also all sort of over-complicated hyphen rules. Thank god it's now simpler; hyphens everywhere.
See what happens when you're used to a saner numbering system? I always hear "soixante ..." and my brain goes "6... something" :p
They're just counting how many fifteens they've got: "two complete fifteens, and 3 from the third fifteen"
Hindi and Marathi both have dedicated names for the tens (11, 12, 13, ...) and after that numbers are named in the reverse order of their digits. E.g. 45 will be five - forty.
_except_ the word for five will be different from the word for five in, say, 75. Similarly, the word for "fifty" in the fifties is different for many of them.
There's a lot of variation which you basically don't realize if you speak these languages natively, the variation can't be boxed into "rules" to make it easy to learn, and the end result is that you just end up implicitly memorizing it.
It's hard to realize because you basically end up modeling this subconsciously as there being multiple ways to say "five" and multiple ways to say "seventy", so the numbers seem to be following a fixed scheme, but in reality you've learned which synonym to use where.
In fact when folks talk about french numbers being weird and complex, this is often the counterexample I give.
I suspect this complexity arose from having synonyms for numbers which eventually randomly settled down, and also from having sandhi (rules for melding words together) which got corrupted over time, leading to things like "tay/ees" vs "chau/bees"
The website probably should have used the "different form"/"different word" thing it did for English. But note that the site did consider "twelve" to be its own number, not 10 + 2, which is basically what's happening here too, just extended 1-100.
Same deal with English.
> and after that numbers are named in the reverse order of their digits. E.g. 45 will be five - forty.
Which is similar in complexity to English, just the order of speaking is reversed.
> _except_ the word for five will be different from the word for five in, say, 75. Similarly, the word for "fifty" in the fifties is different for many of them.
Now I realize what you're saying. It seems that I have memorized every number. Because I never thought of this.
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> Which is similar in complexity to English, just the order of speaking is reversed.
Yes, I was mentioning these to paint an accurate picture, not to contrast with English :)
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As a native Marathi / nonnative Hindi speaker, I can tell you that the Hindi numbers are pretty hard to get, and took me forever to get used to, even though the variations are almost the same as the ones Marathi has.
(However if you asked me about Marathi I'd have the exact same response as you, "what complexity? oh wait I see I've memorized everything oops")
Compare this to "Fifty five" and "Fifty seven".
edit: actually it seems like the Huli system is more uniform than English. It doesn't switch up the word order after 15. So it's "15 and 1 ..." whereas english goes "3 and 10.." and then "2x10 and 1..."