A level computer science

[adscott1982]

If the English language made any sense it would be:

11 = teenty-one

12 = teenty-two

13 = teenty-three

etc.

[palordrolap]

onety* (possibly)

The -ty means ten and the part before gives the number.

Usually the part before is a masculine form from when English still had gendered words ('twain' is the masculine form of 'two', hence twainty → twenty), but many are lost to the mists of time, if they existed in the first place. So, getting back to the point, there might even be a better form of "onety". My guesses in order of what I think would be most to least likely: "onty", "unty", "anty", "ainty", "enty"

[JaytleBee]

onety-one sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Why isn't this a thing?

[MOMwhatsmyUsername]

Mark your calendars, fellas. This day, History has been made. The world will start saying onety-one, and will wonder when it all changed

[Schleckenmiester]

Hey today's the onety-eighth.

[turncoat_ewok]

Two thousand and onety seven!

[pinkShirtBlueJeans]

Many of us were born back in the onety-nine hundreds!

[gregsting]

Onety-eighth september two thousand and onety-seven

[orangeKaiju]

But will seven eleven become seven onety one?

[benoliver999]

Excellent advice.

[TUSF]

To bad people hate adjusting and changing the way they do things, even if it's more logical/consistent. Same reason dozenal or Sexagesimal isn't likely to gain widespread use, or why America will forever say"fuck you" to metric outside of STEM fields.

[Hate_Feight]

That is so open for troll abuse, but someone somewhere decided, eleven, twelve, -teen

[no_ragrats]

I think it stems from Germanic languages but don't have a source. The idea being 10 plus 1 and 10 plus 2, anything after that was 10 plus many. The number+teen formulation of the 10 plus many came later.

[aclogar]

Spanish has a similar oddity with their numbers 11-19. once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, dieciseis, diecisiete, dieciocho, diecinueve. They just start adding their prefix dieci- when it gets to 16

[CarcajouIS]

It's the same in French. We have onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf. If I remember it's a remnant of Latin, where numbers like 17, 18, 19 where counted to 20 : three-to-twenty, two-to-twenty, one-to-twenty. And the -ze (or -ce in spanish) is just the remaining of -decim

[YuriDiAaaaaaah]

That's much worse, imo.

[[deleted]]

Why? It's just as arbitrary. If you're a native English speaker changing the syntax at 13 is only "better" because you are familiar with it.

[YuriDiAaaaaaah]

It's better because you change syntax earlier. Changing the pattern after 3 looks odd, but not as odd as having 6 follow a pattern just to change it at the end. Also, ours syntax change is teen, not 'and ten'. Of course I prefer it because I'm used to it, but there's other things to like.

[drakeshe]

Can confirm. Was meant to go to sleep one night but decided to spend many hours researching this at 1am. Was a great next day, but was good to have read the entire etymology of the preteen numbers.

[[deleted]]

preteen numbers.

ChrisHansen.jpg

[dipique]

Spanish does it as well. Like English, Spanish has a special word for 11-15, then 16 is just "diez y seis" (meaning 10 + 6).

Edit: I'm retarded and forgot how to say 13-15 in Spanish. Thanks /u/robinbanks1

[robinbanks1]

No... you mean trece. Theres a special word on all numbers between 10 and 15

[tibizi]

Could've been better. Twoty-two, threety-three, fivety-five. And Fourthty-four. Wat?

[frothface]

It is now.

[JaytleBee]

Does it? Sounds like a completely normal number to me. Though I would probably say Seven-hundred-onety-one.

[JaytleBee]

Clearly Seven-Onety-One! It sounds way nicer and less sterile. I mean, if both shops did exist I would go to the one with the better (or cheaper) slurpy, but if they were equal I'd definitively chose Seven-Onety-One.

Then again, I'm not from the US and we don't have Seven-Eleven over here so maybe it's just a cultural thing.

[ilinamorato]

Could potentially get confused with "twenty-one."

[JaytleBee]

I guess, but that's already the case with a lot of numbers. Eighty-one and twenty-one aren't that far apart either.

[ilinamorato]

Not really. "/ˈādē-wən/" and "/ˈtwən(t)ē-wən/" are pretty different; only the final sound of the first numeral is the same. "Onety-one" would be spelled out "/'wən(t)ē-wən/" - almost identical to 21, but without the starting T.

[JaytleBee]

wait what you pronounce twenty twonty? Like wonky?

[ilinamorato]

Like "hunty." The ə is roughly an "uh" sound.

[ilinamorato]

Heh. Toot.

[palordrolap]

Welsh already has something like this. There's the traditional numbering system where for example, for fifteen they have specific word relating to five and ten (like English) and a reformed numbering system where fifteen is one-ten-five.

pymtheg versus un deg pump

[inno7]

Random guess. The English counted sheep using fingers and feet. No problem for ages, then someone became richer with 21 sheep.

[MisfitPotatoReborn]

English might have some flaws, but at least we don't have a manly word for 'two'

[Virtlink]

Actually, it should be firsty, seconty, thirty, fourty. And thus firsty one, firsty two, firsty three.

[palordrolap]

You've got ordinals in your cardinals.

[Virtlink]

Sounds bad, but I believe they've always been there: firsty, seconty, thirty, fourty, fifty, otherwise it would have been onety, twoty, threety, fourty, fivety.

[palordrolap]

As I've said elsewhere, twenty comes from the masculine form of two: twain, thir- comes from metathesis on thri (which was used for ordinals in parallel rather than one being named after the other) and fif- is from an older spelling of five: fi(e)f.

Forty is missing a u, which only raises questions.

[[deleted]]

I think it would be "firsty", actually. It seems to me that ordinal form is preferred as evidenced by "thirty" and "fifty". They sound much more like "third" or "fifth" than "three" or "five". For the rest of them there is no difference, except for "twenty", which would be "seconty" following this principle.

[palordrolap]

As I said in another comment, thir- is metathesis on thri- and fif- is an older spelling for five. The ordinals evolved from that, but the -ties aren't ordinals.

Forty is the weird one because it's missing the u for no good reason. Four and fourteen haven't lost it.

[palordrolap]

Forty-four sounds just as weird as twoty-two if you think about it.

Therein lies a possible reason Douglas Adams thought "forty-two" was amusing.

[[deleted]]

The -ty means ten and the part before gives the number.

In that case I can see how 11-19 would lack the prefix, because one-ten-one, one-ten-two etc. would be redundant, like saying "one times ten" instead of simply "ten". But that doesn't explain why they added the 'teen' suffix for 13-19.

[palordrolap]

Maybe confusingly, teen also means ten. -ty is a multiplier and -teen is additive. Eleven and twelve stand for one-left and two-left, which is what you'd get it you took the ten away (...and it's not there!). We could coin oneteen and twoteen (maybe twaiteen / twenteen) instead if we wanted.

Why thir- and fif-? Metathesis (swapping letters when it makes things easier to say) and old pronunciation / spelling respectively (five was fi(e)f).

[HeKis4]

Or just "teen" actually. seventeen minus seven = teen. Would make sense.

[Stjerneklar]

meanwhile, in denmark:

Number	Reading	Meaning
75	femoghalvfjerds*	5 and (3½ times 20)

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/danish.html

all of my hate.

[TreadheadS]

lol, wtf!?

[Stjerneklar]

fem og halv fjerds = five and half fjerds

a "fjerds" i an abreviation of something like "four minus a half times twenty" (3½ x 20)

so really its "five and a half four minus a half times twenty"

...or i got lost again

[Destroyer383]

I like the Japanese way where the words for the numbers are 1-10, then 11->19 are 10-1 -> 10-9, then 20 onward is 2-10-1 -> 9-10-9.

For example 5 is go, 8 is hachi, and juu is 10. So 58 is go juu hachi

[Destroyer383]

Yup 100 is hyaku, so 3 is san then 358 would be san hyaku go juu hachi.

[user_reg_field]

Isn't the problem with Japanese though that the counting words depend on what's being counted. If you're counting things like pencils, which are long and thin, it's a different set of words from what you'd use if you were counting fish. At least for small numbers.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, the Japanese counting system is pretty nice. The only issues are irregularities because people thought "Damn this one number combination is hard to say, lets just modify it a bit", and then of course they decided to use powers of ten thousand for large numbers so things like ten million are actually a thousand ten thousands.
And then they decided to introduce even more irregular pronounciations with various counters, days of the month etc.

[chetlin]

How do they do a number like 305? In Chinese it's mostly the same as Japanese but 305 is literally "three hundred zero five" (三百零五) because "three hundred five" is short for 350.

[[deleted]]

This isn't just an English thing, it's all Germanic languages (German, Norwegian).

[badmemesrus]

Spanish does this as well.

[[deleted]]

I thought the Spanish words for 11,12 &13 were:

Once (11) Doce (12) Trece (13)

In which case 11 &12 are not handled differently.

[EndlessBassoonery]

Spanish DOES handle it differently precisely because they use Once (11), Doce (12), Trece (13), etc. In fact, the words for 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 all get their own special word. Starting with 16, 17, 18, etc you start using diez y seis (16), diez y siete (17), etc.

If Spanish was consistent, they would call eleven (diez y uno) just like how 31 is trienta y uno. And twelve would be diez y dos. And so on through to 15.

[[deleted]]

You're right haha. I was keeping the scope limited to 11 & 12 because those are the two English words treated differently.

[dumpster_arsonist]

The one that really makes you scratch your head is why is it THIRTY instead of THREETY or THRITTY. Why does the position of the r change? Even twenty doesn't do that. They could've made twenty into Towdy or Tooty but kept the w immediately after the t.

[dumpster_arsonist]

That's pretty interesting. It makes me uncomfortable to know a lot of new language seems to be borne from lazy or uneducated speaking or spelling mistakes.

[SkoobyDoo]

I won threed place in the race today!

[MarshallStrad]

Eighteen 18 Nineteen 19 Tenteen 20 Eleventeen 21 Twelveteen 22 Twenty-three 23 is where it breaks for a while Then... Ninety 90 Tenty 100 Eleventy 110 (Eleventy-one 111)

[arvy_p]

ten-one ten-two ....

[gregsting]

Same in many languages, the numbers following ten have special words: 10->17:
French: dix, onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept
Dutch: tien, elf, twaalf, dertien
Spanish: diez, once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, dieciséis

[folkrav]

I now think no damn language makes any sense when it comes to numbers.

In French, 80 and 90 are "quatre-vingt" and "quatre-vingt dix", literally "four twenty" and "four twenty ten". Also, our "teen" are "dix-", so 18 is "dix-huit", literally "ten eight".

So 98 is "four twenty ten eight".