(inspired by some talk on facebook from another KRer about linguistic representations of numbers and their relation to a/the numerical system.)
Come one, come all?
So yeah, I assume everyone on
KR uses the base 10 system, it seems to be the most common in the world and I guess it comes from the fact that we have ten fingers to work with.
But what I got to thinking about is how the numbers are represented. I mean, we have the numbers one to ten with all of their relevant names, and we represent things like 21 or 67 verbally in English as twenty-one or sixty-seven. And that seems like a pretty straightforward relationship between the actual numbers and their names. By that I mean, basic names like "two" or "hundred" are still arbitrary, but counting can be predictable (102 = "one/a-hundred-and-two") for the most part if you know those names.
But how do you account for the names of numbers 11-19? All of the languages I've ever been able to count in to any extent have anomalies somewhere within that range, some more significant than others.
Like in English, 11 isn't ten-one, it's "eleven". 12 isn't ten-two, it's "twelve". 13 isn't ten-three, it's "thirteen"??? I guess you could assume that "thirteen", "fourteen" and so on are a bit like saying three-ten, four-ten, etc.
But funny stuff happens in French too... onze, douze, treize, quatorze, etc... up until 16 and then it goes into that ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine thing you'd expect with dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf, etc (forgive my spelling, it's been a while). Obviously the beginning of words like "treize" clues you in a bit to the number, but how'd it end up being different?
And Spanish too, although it is obviously extremely similar to the French.
But then Italian seems a bit more sensible (its numbers also resemble Latin the most out of all I mentioned so far). It seems to go one-ten, two-ten, three-ten, etc, up until 16 and then switches around to ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine, etc.
And in Greek it's pretty sensible too, but it goes endeka, dodeka, dekatria, dekatessera, etc, so the first two names are like one-ten, two-ten, and then the rest are like ten-three, ten-four, etc.
Funnily enough, Romanian keeps the same order (one-ten, two-ten, etc) throughout the sequence 11-19 but it's the opposite order from the rest of their numbers.
As for German, they seem to have totally anomalous 11 and 12 like in English, but 13 onwards (three-ten, four-ten) follows the same pattern as seen in the rest of their numbers, whereas in English that's not the case.
Chinese seems pretty regular from the 30 seconds I spent looking at whatever form of it I happened to land on via google?
So where did those odd names in English/German/French/Spanish come from, and why are Italian and Greek switching order at some point through that sequence 11-19? It's quite puzzling, I wish I knew how that came about and what (if any) the motivations were for it. And I really don't know what article in wikipedia I'd want to lazily look at for this kind of stuff.
Feel free to add examples from other languages or correct me on anything daft I have said above. I was trying to build a picture here, but I don't know enough to have gotten as far as I'd like.
And also feel free to hit up this thread with talk about language or numbers. or both. it's all good.
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