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
The European languages you listed all have common origins – French and Romanian are both descended from Vulgar Latin, while English, German and Icelandic are all descended from Proto-Germanic, and going back even further they’re all descended from Proto-Indo-European. So a lot of their words for numbers come from the same source.
Also I think all of the languages you picked happen to have a base 10 number system, which is by far the most common, but there are plenty of languages that use other bases, and even languages that don’t really have a number system or that have one without a base.
So you’d probably want to look at a broader set of languages if you wanted to get an understanding of where the “special” numbers stop and the ones that follow simple patterns start. But it makes intuitive sense that we use smaller numbers more often and it’s easy to remember special names for them, and then at some point we start using a consistent formula to simply things. And there is no reason why that cross-over should happen at the same point in every language.
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