• Aqarius@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    1 year ago

    Germanic languages share this. German has neun, zehn, elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn…

    • Serisar@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

      • homoludens@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        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”).

        • Naeron@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          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

          • garden_boi@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            🤯 Didn’t notice that one! Yes, that’s indeed more irregular in English!

          • thekidxp@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • samus12345@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              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.

        • Wilzax@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          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