• Asetru
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    3 months ago

    English has “twenty-one”, but no “onety-one”.

    But you have teens? Thirteen, fourteen etc? It’s just that a dozen was kind of special, so eleven and twelve are kind of irregular, but afterwards it’s just ordinary base 10, isn’t it?

    • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
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      3 months ago

      But the endian switches for the teens — twenty three is “tens place ones place,” but thirteen is “ones place tens place.”

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Well, English does. Not my native language.

      Yes, my point exactly. No “onety-one”, because “eleven”.

      Same with other languages.

      But “thirteen”, “fourteen” etc, you think are as regular as “twenty one”, “thirty three” “forty five”?

      It is base-10 all the way through, but I’m just pointing out that probably at one point in history, even other languages, for some reason, counted 1-20 differently than 20+ numbers and they sort of stuck.