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As a parent of English/Danish bilingual children I have to tell you that you are very wrong on this.

My children still occasionally make mistakes when saying numbers in the range 50-99 in Danish, they haven't said the English numbers wrong for years.

That the word for 50 contains the word "tre" (three) and the word for 90 contains the word "fem" (five) is very confusing to our children, especially when the English equivalents are so simple in comparison.

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Fair enough. As a child I could never remember if it was 50 or 60 that had "halv" (50 is halvtreds, 60 is treds, neither word have any resemblance to 5, 6 or 10, but 50 sounds a bit like it ought to be half of 60), but my point is that the number system has nothing to do with base 20 except a few etymological roots of some names, that for all intents and purposes might as well be random.

But you are right: they are worse than random, since they are named close enough to other entities to be confuseaable.

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