onety one; onety two; onety three

Change numbering system?

  • Yes. Use onety one etc.

    Votes: 3 18.8%

  • No. Leave it the same

    Votes: 8 50.0%

  • Yes. Change it but here is a better way.

    Votes: 3 18.8%

  • other

    Votes: 2 12.5%
  • Total voters
    16
IAM

IAM

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wish I knew
The numbers 1 through 9 are as follows:
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine

Once we reach twenty one there is a consistent system in place where we just change the prefix... twenty one; thirty one; forty one... but the numbers 11 through 19 don't fit the pattern.

Why do we have such an odd way of naming numbers 11 through 19?

Why not use the same counting system we use for numbers 21 and up by saying onety one for 11 etc.?
 
Because language is a holdover from previous usages plus a bastardized mixture from the intersection of many other languages and anything new that anyone wants to throw into the mix that happens to stick. There may be some languages out there that are more rational than the English language. I don't know. But the English language is not rational, and shouldn't be expected to be so. And that's really because of the nature and history of it. It was never created as a coherent whole. But rather grew up as a hodgepodge of whatever worked and people wanted to use. Few people even remember how we got many of the messes that we did within the language.
 
Cutlass said:
Because language is a holdover from previous usages plus a bastardized mixture from the intersection of many other languages and anything new that anyone wants to throw into the mix that happens to stick. There may be some languages out there that are more rational than the English language. I don't know. But the English language is not rational, and shouldn't be expected to be so. And that's really because of the nature and history of it. It was never created as a coherent whole. But rather grew up as a hodgepodge of whatever worked and people wanted to use. Few people even remember how we got many of the messes that we did within the language.
Click to expand...

Some oddities are just weird but by making counting more consistent we make learning numbers easier and could be inserted into school easily. Of all the junk congress does why not fix an issue to make things simpler?
 
IAM said:
Some oddities are just weird but by making counting more consistent we make learning numbers easier and could be inserted into school easily. Of all the junk congress does why not fix an issue to make things simpler?
Click to expand...


Because it wouldn't really make anything easier. Except for the English as a second language crowd, we all know this by the time we are 5 or 6. It is so ingrained and natural to us that it's not an issue.
 
Because ten is the correct way to say one when added to another digit? It would be tenyone, tenytwo, tenythree. Instead they put the ten in the reverse order and you ended up with teen. Eleven and twelve are probably left overs of a 12 base system, that had 12 unique identifiers.
 
timtofly said:
Because ten is the correct way to say one when added to another digit? It would be tenyone, tenytwo, tenythree. Instead they put the ten in the reverse order and you ended up with teen. Eleven and twelve are probably left overs of a 12 base system, that had 12 unique identifiers.
Click to expand...

tenyone does have a strong cute factor. Sounds like a puppies name.
 
People being people will always end up making inconcsistences in language. Even if everyone was forced to use a "rational" system, it'd eventually "become" "irrational" within a generation or two due to various reasons. Language always change, and it's why there's much silliness in not only English, but pretty much any language. I feel the silliness in English is only easily apparent because it's so widely spoken. As Cutlass said, most people who speak English fluently remember it naturally enough.
 
Because English is a Germanic language.
 
Owen Glyndwr said:
Because English is a Germanic language.
Click to expand...

English is the bastard child of Romance and Germanic. :mischief:

But yes English is ultimately a Germanic language... to elaborate on Owen's point, even though a lot of English vocabulary is derived from Romance, much of the grammar and basic core terms are Germanic so far as I know. Owen can correct me on this, but I think it's something like even though 80% of English vocabulary is Romance it's the reverse when you're talking about the most commonly used words. A bit akin to Vietnamese in regards to Chinese, but that's off topic.
 
I read somewhere that part of the Asian advantage in math may be a simpler to understand language regarding numbers (at least in Chinese). For example thirty-nine is 2-tens&nine, etc. making at least simple additional & subtraction much easier. I'd be curious to hear a Chinese perspective on this though.
 
Narz said:
I read somewhere that part of the Asian advantage in math may be a simpler to understand language regarding numbers (at least in Chinese). For example thirty-nine is 2-tens&nine, etc. making at least simple additional & subtraction much easier. I'd be curious to hear a Chinese perspective on this though.
Click to expand...

I'm not Chinese but Vietnamese numerals are structured similarly to Chinese numbers for the most part (I think), and I can say I don't think knowing Vietnamese numbers gave me much of an advantage. Granted, I could just suck at math to begin with, but I don't think it gave much of my fellow Vietnamese an advantage. It sounds like a theory to explain supposed Asian excellence in the STEM fields, but eh, I dunno.
 
Narz said:
I read somewhere that part of the Asian advantage in math may be a simpler to understand language regarding numbers (at least in Chinese). For example thirty-nine is 2-tens&nine, etc. making at least simple additional & subtraction much easier. I'd be curious to hear a Chinese perspective on this though.
Click to expand...

Not really no. thirty-nine in English is 3-tens&nine. The French are no better at math than we are even though their expression for 98 is quatre-vingt-dix-huit (four-twenties&ten&eight). The fact is that even though we all have different means for expressing numbers in language, we all think of them in more or less the same way, at least from a fundamentally linguistic perspective.

"eighty" is always going to be "eighty" regardless of whether it's "eight-tens", "four-twenties", or "eleven-sevens&three"
 
Narz said:
I read somewhere that part of the Asian advantage in math may be a simpler to understand language regarding numbers (at least in Chinese). For example thirty-nine is 2-tens&nine, etc. making at least simple additional & subtraction much easier. I'd be curious to hear a Chinese perspective on this though.
Click to expand...

A related hypothesis is that numbers in Chinese (and related languages) are much shorter to say.
 
Liberals attacking our sacred institutions. I reserve the right to reserve some of our legacy nukes to defend the teens from socialist alien euro anarchies.

We demand the elimination of the metric system and compliance with enlightened Freedmen norms.

Pronto.
 
Owen Glyndwr said:
"eighty" is always going to be "eighty" regardless of whether it's "eight-tens", "four-twenties", or "eleven-sevens&three"
Click to expand...
I agree with the first 2, but "eleven-sevens&three" is different, because it uses a base that's not easily convertible to 10. Anyone calling eighty "eleven-sevens&three" would not consider it a round number, like we do.
 
cybrxkhan said:
But yes English is ultimately a Germanic language... to elaborate on Owen's point, even though a lot of English vocabulary is derived from Romance, much of the grammar and basic core terms are Germanic so far as I know. Owen can correct me on this, but I think it's something like even though 80% of English vocabulary is Romance it's the reverse when you're talking about the most commonly used words. A bit akin to Vietnamese in regards to Chinese, but that's off topic.
Click to expand...
Is that 80% of the vocabulary is Chinese, or the most commonly used words are Chinese?
 
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