The third and following decades are usually very regular.
#Ancient numbers in different languages full
The second decade is full of irregularities, but not usually new bases. In any system, the first decade is usually composed of unique base units (though not always in Ute, for instance, nine means 'almost ten'). This extends to decades (for 10-based systems I'll use the term for all recurring sequences, of whatever base) as well as numbers.
#Ancient numbers in different languages plus
Plus there are two sexes which mate in pairs, and that's an area rife with irregularity and arbitrariness. 1-syllable Comparative bigger (2-syllable easier/more solid) Polysyllable more interestingĭisyllabic comparatives are irregular and arbitraryĪs well as many other linguistic phenomena, which suggests that duality of one kind or another is semantically unusual, and has some of the irregular and arbitrary characteristics of the numeral one (which is often extended for use as a demonstrative, a pronoun, or an article, and which has unique syntax in every language) as well as some of the regular characteristics of compositional numbers like seventy-three.ĭual is transitional between singular and plural, and it's semantically significant because we are bilaterally symmetric animals and therefore have plenty of reason to refer to things that come in pairs.Probably the main generalization here is that numbers, and number patterns, often repeat theĭual words and morphology are irregular and arbitrary (e.g, Eng glasses, pants, both, pair, couple) And the other numbers between 10 and 20 show quite a lot of variation, even in European languages, as you point out for various Romance languages. There have to be 12 unique base units for duodecimal, just as there have to be 16 for hexadecimal. And why these words in Romance languages seem to have splintered due to geography while in Germanic languages they haven't?Įleven and twelve are remnants of a duodecimal system which still shows up in words like dozen.
I'm mostly curious as to why the numbers 10-20 seem to have more differences between languages than any other set of numbers (after 0-10 of course). Modern Germanic languages all have 11 and 12 as unique words, while modern Romance languages are split between 11-15 (Spanish and Portuguese), 11-16 (French, Catalan and Italian) and none at all (Romanian). So it seems that in Europe only Germanic and Romance languages have unique words between 10 and 20.
Latin itself has 11-17 following one pattern, and 18 and 19 with a different pattern. Finnish and Czech appear to also have no unique words (or all unique words depending on your outlook: they use a suffix different to the word ten). Gaelic, Romanian and Hungarian have no unique words between 10 and 20. Greek also acts similarly and has 11 and 12 with different forms to the other numbers. and I just found out that Spanish and Portuguese go up to 15.Ĭhecking online I can see that Catalan and Italian follow French, going up to 16, while German, Dutch and Nordic languages follow English and stop at 12.
French for example goes up to 16 before saying 10-7, 10-8 etc. Here I am using unique just to mean words which follow a different pattern to simply number + the word for ten, or which are formed differently to the other numbers between 10 and 20. But my question is why do different languages have different cut-off points for unique words. I've read a similar question here which mainly dealt with why English only has eleven and twelve as unique words with some interesting ideas.