this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Literally every single point listed by @captain_[email protected] applies 100% identically to German. Could you explain how English is less consistent than German?
Literally only because of "teen/ten" difference. Everything else matches up, except that the roles of the cardinal stem (three) and the ordinal stem (thir) are swapped in 13 and 30 for German
Three, thirteen, thirty, third vs Drei, Dreizehn, Dreißig, Dritte
Used 3 as an example because it's the most irregular out of the 9 non-zero digits in German
English has four-teen fif-teen etc. up until twenty and from that point forward has the decade in front of the single number twenty-one. In contrast to German which at least Always has the single digit in front of the decade
🤯 Didn't notice that one! Yes, that's indeed more irregular in English!
To be fair English has a lot of German. The "teen" sound almost certainly comes from the sound "zehn". It's pretty easy to hear how fünfzehn und sechszehn eventually become fifteen and sixteen. We're more or less saying five ten just kinda mushed together.
More accurately, modern English and German come from the same root. A Proto-Germanic word for 15 developed into "fünfzehn" in German and "fifteen" in English.