521
How to say the number 92
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Man and here I thought the English system was kinda screwy, where at first it's in base 12 and base 20 at the same time what with having special unique names for all digits up to twelve, and then thirteen through nineteen are also uniquely weird, then at twenty we decide "man fuck that" and then it's in base 10 until we repeat that pattern every 100, ie "one hundred seventeen." Or then we occasionally do stupid things like "seventeen hundred" instead of "one thousand seven hundred."
It just now hit me that "teenager" is an inherently English construct because that weird partial second decade we have. I'm curious, how does that work in languages? Like, in French they have special words up to 16 and only do "ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine." You spend seven years as a teenager in England but only three in France.
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?
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.