this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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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
🤯 Didn't notice that one! Yes, that's indeed more irregular in English!
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.