ELI5: Why are 11 and 12 called eleven and twelve and not oneteen and twoteen? | Hacker News Reader

ELI5: Why are 11 and 12 called eleven and twelve and not oneteen and twoteen?

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28 pointsthunderbong30 comments

Most (all?) Slavic languages just go oneteen twoteen. There's a word for 12 (tuzin) and 60 (kopa) but very rarely used.

On the other hand we have a word for 1.5 which is sorely missing in English - półtora.

On the other other hand English does weird stuff with thousands - saying 2300 as 23 hundred.

> On the other other hand English does weird stuff with thousands - saying 2300 as 23 hundred.

Czech often does the same thing though, both when counting and naming years - "devatenáct set osmdesát čtyři" is literally "nineteen hundred eighty four"

There's "půldruha" and "poldruha" in Czech and Slovak too, but I feel like it loses competition to "jeden a půl/pol" in terms of usage.

It’s US English that pronounces it that way.

I’d say, two thousand-three hundred. UK English.

what about 2 point 3 kay ...

2300 - 23 hundred is a spoken informal thing. Two thousand three hundred is another common usage which might be the 'proper' way.

Yeah I know, but it blew my mind when I first heard it, because nobody splits the numbers like that in Polish.

Probably because we have a postfix for hundreds, so 200, 300, etc are single words (dwieście, trzysta, etc).

Maybe English could use -dred like that :) Thousand ninedred eighty four :)

if you think that's "weird", then you should see the French 98:

"quatre-vingt-dix-huit" -- (4*20)+10 8

In Russian, the teens are 1-9 + “надцать” suffix. Which as far as I can understand literally means “a number from 11-19”.

An example would be 12: dve [two] nadset [suffix meaning a number 11-19].

-naście in Polish

So very similar, just no hard D?

Huh, tuzin is interestingly close to dozen.

Both appear to be derived from the same source:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dutzend https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tuzin https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dozen

The most recent common ancestor is Old French “dozaine”, and ultimately it derives from Latin “duodecim”.

Tangentially related but I embarrassingly recently made the off-by-two connection between the later English month names and their numbers (September, October, November, December). I think the discrepancy is because of a calendar change at some point?

Julius Caesar moved to a solar calendar with 12 months to better track the seasons compared to the 10 month Lunar calendar. Naturally he got a month (July) named after himself. August would come later (named after Augustus Caesar, his adopted son). The months that were added however were actually January and February (the calendar year used to end in December and start with March. July was Quntilis (5th month) and August Sextilis (6th).

I didn't know about the renaming and Jan/Feb. That makes sense.

What about the other month names? February, March, April, May, June? Did they get renamed as well?

I assume January is from Janus.

Blame the Romans for that. July and August were added into the middle. Specifically Julius and Augustus.

From Proto-Germanic ainalif and twalif "one/two left (over)".

Language is a product of history and does not necessarily have a logical explanation. The answer is "because" and the theory is usually that numbers bigger than the ones we use our fingers to count were not usually dealt with in pre-the literate societies from which our languages derive. That seems reasonable, since without writing it is difficult to keep track of large numbers. But it's just a theory!

Yes, the answer is always, it is language not math. I hate when people die on grammar hills when English is so full of exceptions it is easier to just accept that just about anything goes

In latin it's undecem, meaning 10+1 essentially. duodecem, etc. Until you get to 18... that's duodevigente, which is to say two from twenty, so kinda reversed. This continues on though for 28-29, etc... 19 is undevigente, 28 is duotrigenta, 29 is untrigenta, etc.

Spelling may be off it's been 2-3 decades since I took 4 years of Latin in High School.

I think what I like most about esperanto is the counting system.

1 - unu

2 - du

3 - tri

10 - dek

11 - dek unu

12 - dek du

13 - dek tri

Etc...

Mandarin, Mongolian, and Japanese do the same. Dutch meanwhile always puts the ones before the tens: 42 is "tweeënveertig", literally "two and forty".

So Dutch is little-endian?

You wish! 123 becomes "hundred three and twenty". 4723 becomes "seven and forty hundred three and twenty" or "four thousand seven hundred three and twenty."

Oh, middle-endian; a classic:P

(Why yes, I do have strong feelings about American dates, why do you ask?)

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