This is an odd one. Are there any words for numbers between 10 & 100 that are not derived from a combination of elements meaning other numbers that can be added or multiplied to get them?
I mean, is there a word for 14 that isn’t “four-(&)-ten,” for example?
I’m looking for words in Indo-European languages, but any will do.
English eleven
Irish fiche = twenty
French vingt = twenty
(and related words for twenty in Latin and other Romance languages)
Eleven?
Twelve?
Would the term “score” count for twenty? Then, there’s “twenty” for that matter…
Ok, so the various IE forms of “twenty” (which seem to trace back to a proto-IE word), “eleven,” & “twelve.”
Of course, “twenty” & “twelve” do show marks in English of derivative from “two.”
What else?
ETA: I knew about “score” of course.
Surely there are dozens!
That’s gross.
Spanish: once, doce, trece, catorce, quince
French: onze, duoze, treize, quatroze, quinze, seize
German: elf, zwölf
Oops, misread.
Eh, as you say, English “twenty” is pretty clearly derived along the lines “twain-tens”. Similarly, “eleven” along the lines “one left” and “twelve” along the lines “two left”. I dunno; it doesn’t seem much different from “thirteen” as “three-ten”.
That is definitely the case in Spanish. Once, Doce, Trece, Catorce, Quince are clearly following the pattern of 12345… with the “ce” at the end, which probably makes more sense in some other related language.
Most of the words named thus far, if traced far enough back, are not etymologically distinct from other numbers. Even the Germanic “eleven” appears to mean “one left.”
So there’s “score.”
This is pretty much what I expected.
Well, any slang words? Anything?
Well, there’s “gross” for 144, though it falls afoul of your under 100 rule.
As I said above, there are DOZENS.
“dozen” is etymologically from “duodecim”; i.e., “two-ten”.
In Bengali, counting from 1 to 100 is fairly complicated. In some places there are patterns, but those patterns are not always explained by (X number + Y number)
&k dui tin char pa~ch chhoe shat ath noe dosh
&garo baro t&ro choddo ponero sholo shatero athero unish kuri
ekush baish teish chobbish po~chish chhabbish shatash athash unotrish tirish
ektrish botrish tetrish choutrish po~ytrish …
Sheep-counting numbers from East Sussex:
yan
tan
tethera
pethera
pimp
sethera
lethera
hovera
covera
dik
yan-a-dik
tan-a-dik
tethera-dik
pethera-dik
bumpit (15)
yan-a-bumpit
tan-a-bumpit
tethera-bumpit
pethera-bumpit
figgit (20)
This offers other dialects/languages, too. 15 certainly seems to be important, and I suppose there’s an obvious logic to using base 15 in an oral situation - counting to 10 on hands is no problem, and you can keep one hand still fully-counted while using the digits of the other to count an extra four, before starting over. That’s a WAG, mind.
I am so using “bumpit.” In context, it looks like a vowel-shifted contraction of pimp + dik, but it’s so munged, who cares?
Taking another look at the list I linked to, base 5 seems to dominate, actually. Particularly for rapid counting, where the rhythms lend themselves to grouping into fives.