I was going to bemoan not having a special character for 11 and 12 but I guess people weren’t writing things down so much in the 1500’s and maybe there were characters for those numbers.
I wonder if that’s why we name 11 eleven and 12 twelve rather than firsteen and seconteen.
Nah, eleven and twelve not having a -teen suffix is because English doesn’t have any standards and steals language randomly. Both are germanic in origin, but different time periods. Eleven and twelve come from a 12th century system of counting on your fingers (twelve basically means ‘two left’ after you count to ten), and -teen is from a 14th century math perspective (thirteen basically means ‘ten more than three’).
Fair enough.
I was going to bemoan not having a special character for 11 and 12 but I guess people weren’t writing things down so much in the 1500’s and maybe there were characters for those numbers.
I wonder if that’s why we name 11 eleven and 12 twelve rather than firsteen and seconteen.
Nah, eleven and twelve not having a -teen suffix is because English doesn’t have any standards and steals language randomly. Both are germanic in origin, but different time periods. Eleven and twelve come from a 12th century system of counting on your fingers (twelve basically means ‘two left’ after you count to ten), and -teen is from a 14th century math perspective (thirteen basically means ‘ten more than three’).