For example, some languages follow the same rule regardless if its in 10s or 20s:
Japanese | Chinese |
Juu-ni | Shi er | twelve
Ni-juu-ni | Er shi er | twenty two
But other languages such as:
English | French | Romanian | Icelandic | German | Philipino |
Twelve | douze | doisprezece (two towards ten wtf) | tólf | zwölf | labindalawa
Twenty two | vingt-deux | Douăzeci și doi (two tens and two) | tuttugu og tveir | zweiundzwanzig (two and twenty) | dalawampu’t dalawa
Initially I thought it was an european thing but not even koreans do it like japanese or chinese people, so why is that?
In: 38
This is definitely not academically sourced, just from my general knowledge, but here it goes.
The first part is that languages all evolve slowly from common ancestors. Some of the languages you mention (basically, the European ones) are so closely related that linguists *can*, with some degree of accuracy, reconstruct their proto-language, called Proto-Indo-European, the origin of most European and (north) Indian languages. But beyond that it gets very scarce and very speculative. We can’t ever hope to reconstruct the “first” language in any meaningful way, but if our general theories about language evolution are correct, almost everything that’s found in lots of unrelated modern languages likely came from this very early proto-language. It could very well be that odd names for the lower numbers beyond 10 are part of this. Which leads to the second part.
The second part is that, base-10 (0-9 numerals) is actually a relatively recent invention. Most of Europe didn’t even conceive of 0 until the middle ages with the arrival of Arabic (and properly, *Indian*) numerals which included the concept of a 0. There was no 0 in Roman Numerals, for instance. Thus, the way we do numbers in the west today was a relatively new thing at around 500 years ago. Before that, you tended to have letters represent specific numbers (like Roman Numerals do, along with many other similar systems) and group them together to make large numbers. I’m not knowledgeable about the Chinese system before the introduction of modern Arabic numerals, but I imagine it took a similar method, and like how many European languages were influenced by Latin, most east Asian languages were influenced by ancient Chinese.
But most people most of the time wouldn’t be dealing with hundreds or thousands of something. They’d be dealing with smaller amounts, so it made sense to have words for >10 but still relatively small amounts. Thus words evolved to make saying these things easier, and this causes all sorts of weird counting systems. French uses 20’s, ancient Sumerian used base-60, and English has a hodgepodge of Germanic and Romance (Latin-derived) systems. So it all gets complicated quickly.
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