Why do we say eleven instead of oneteen

Anything above that was "more". One and two more than ten were still counted, but anything beyond them was perhaps, as so often happens among primitive people, merely considered "many.

Later, Menninger notes that "[n]umber words are among the words of a language that most strongly resist change" p. The durability of number words also supports the hypothesis that an extension of the "N left" system was not widespread in the ancestors of English, because if it had been, it probably wouldn't have been widely superseded by the -teen words.

Still, there is something a little odd about the theory that speakers of Old Germanic did not follow the pattern and start saying "three left", etc. Such non-pattern-following would seem to correspond to a pretty early stage of intellectual development in the history of the Germanic tribes -- presumably before they came into regular contact with Romans, who knew how to count much higher. Incidentally, Lithuanian is the one Indo-European language known to actually have continued the pattern "three left", "four left", all the way up to "nine left" ; it has kept these words until today.

Menninger p. If the latter is the case, then the observation at the end of the previous paragraph suggests that this was a fairly isolated Germanic innovation, one that did not take hold in many places -- otherwise, the -teen words would have had a hard time taking over. Overall, our knowledge of the answer to question 2 is obviously much sketchier than of the answer to 1 , but it is fun to speculate.

He also gives examples to suggest that in several other languages, just as in the West Germanic ones, the words for eleven and twelve are older and more primitive than those for The thing of "Dubbing numbers unique names up till 12 twelve and no further" may have also been influenced by the number of times you see a full moon during a year. You cannot precisely tell whether it has or hasn't been a full year just by observing seasons.

But you can tell one year's time quite precisely if you keep measuring the maximum and minimum shadow lengths of stationary objects throughout a year. Then if you count how many moons have passed during that time then 12 is a number that you encounter in nature as well as 10 which is the number of your fingers. One other kinda weird hypothesis was that Sumerians perhaps had 6 fingers on each hand, but that one, of course, is quite unsupported.

As for the situation in French language where numbers are named uniquely from 1 to 16; and then from 17 on it becomes "seven and ten" "eight and ten" etc. Yet somehow in Indian and in Korean there are even more counter-intuitive hybrid patterns of counting numbers.

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Active 6 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 54k times. Improve this question. Joost Schuur Joost Schuur 2, 3 3 gold badges 17 17 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. We had a related discussion math.

Perhaps lending credence to your idea about divisibility, 12 is a highly composite number ; the next one is This applies to romance languages as well.

Spanish has unique words for eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. And traditional Welsh has an even more complicated pattern: "one-on-ten", "two-on-ten" up to "four-on-ten", then "fifteen" i. A long, long time ago, when the number words were first being formed, most people didn't have much reason to distinguish numbers above ten.

In fact, some languages of primitive cultures only have number words for one, two, and many. So the basic number words up to ten formed first, then they were extended a bit with the —lif ending. Maybe there was a threelif , fourlif type system, but 11 and 12 were used more often in daily life. Many number systems are based on 12 because it's divisible by the most numbers, and because you can count to 12 on one hand by using your thumb to count three knuckles on each of the other fingers.

We have the word dozen because 12 is so useful. If 11 and 12 are being used more frequently, the forms for them will stick, even when another system starts to develop. You can extend that idea to other number words. The fact that 12 could be so conveniently divided in so many different ways made it particularly useful, in everyday terms, in dealing with fractions, proportions, allocations, and measurements.

It even led to some separate words for a set of twelve dozen and a set of twelve twelves gross entering our language, and to many ancient number systems using a base of 12, not Got there eventually But with over posts to reformat, well—apologies, this might take a while Thanks for your patience in the meantime—and any problems or questions, just let us know at haggard haggardhawks. Paul Anthony Jones. Sep Sep 2.