Except the French… WHY would you make eighty into “four-twenties”?
(and there’s no separate word for ninety, so a number like ninety-eight is “four-twenties-ten-eight”… Quatre-vingt dix-huit).
This made me curious and I started checking. The pattern is there but it doesn’t seem to be consistent.
English: 1-12 - unique names; 13-19 - root names (the base number + teen).
French: 1-10 - unique names; 11-16 - root names (base number + ze); 17-19 root names (dix [ten] + base number). The strange thing about French in that it has no word for 70, 80, or 90. 70-79 are named 60+10, 60+11, 60+12, etc. 80-89 are named 4+20, 4+20+1, 4+20+2, etc. and 90-99 are 4+20+10, 4+20+11, 4+20+12, etc.
German: 1-12 - unique names; 13-19 - base number + zehn [ten]. The Germans also do higher numbers in the reverse order from English. They say the equivalent of two-forty, six-sixty, and one-eighty instead of forty-two, sixty-six, and eighty-one.
Italian: 1-10 - unique names; 11-16 - root names (base number + dici [ten]); 17-19 - root names (dici + base number)
Polish: 1-10 - unique names; 11-19 - root names (base number + nascie). One unusual thing about Polish is the words for 9 and 10 are almost identical; dziewiec and dziesiec.
Spanish: 1-10 unique names; 11-15 - root names (base number + ce); 16-19 root names (dieci (ten) + base number)
Swedish: 1-12 unique names; 13-19 - root names (base number + ton)
There also is a divide over 20. English, German, and Polish have a word for 20 (twenty, zwei, dwadziescia) that seems connected their word for 2 (two, zwanzig, dwa). Other languages seem to have a word for 20 (vingt, venti, veinte) that appears unrelated to their word for 2 (deux, due, dos). (Swedish has tva and tjugo and I’m not sure if tjugo (20) is derived from tva (2) or if tjugo is a unique name.)
I realize seven is a ridiculously small sample size, especially when they’re all European languages. But I didn’t feel like transliterating languages that used non-Roman alphabets. Plus I got bored. So I’m going to leap ahead to my conclusions.
The Latin influence is evident. The languages in southern Europe use variations of Latin’s duo and viginti for their words for 2 and 20. The languages in northern Europe seemed to derive their word for 20 from their word for 2. The southern languages also seemed, like Latin, to have root names for 11 and 12, while the northern languages used unique names for these numbers. Polish straddles the line by using root names for 11 and 12 (like the southern languages) but having the 2-20 connection (like northern languages). And I don’t know why French lost the ability to count past sixty.
Note that this is true for the Parisian dialect that became modern French, but other dialects of French, such as Swiss, Belgian, and the Acadian used in parts of Canada, do have and use numbers that are the equivalent of “seventy/eighty/ninety”.
It sounds classy – just ask Abe Lincoln.
Wouldn’t the numbers up through the teens enter languages earlier than the rest of a counting system meant to go up to infinity? They wouldn’t need to be as regular as the higher numbers because there aren’t that many of them.
The French number system may be a relic of an earlier vigesimal (base 20) system, as was used in Mayan and Aztec numbers, and is still used in many languages today. Wikipedia lists a whole crapload of languages that have a fully or partially vigesimal number system, including Danish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Basque, as well as many non-European languages. As to why French only partially switched from vigesimal to decimal, the reason, if any, appears to be lost to history.
In parts of England, especially those that were invaded by Vikings, an unusual counting system is used for tallying sheep. As far as I know, they all stop at twenty at which point the counter would notch a tally and start over.
It’s interesting that they seem to use the base twenty and the ‘teens’ change at 15.
I wonder if other countries have similar counting systems.
Yain
Tain
Tethera
Peddera
Pit
Tayter
Layter
Overa
Covera
Dix
Yain-a-dix
Tain-a-dix
Eddera-a-dix
Peddera-a-dix
Bumfit
Yain-a-bumfit
Tain-a-bumfit
Eddera-bumfit
Jiggit
Talking of numbers, I was reading about Benford’s Law recently. In a random number set, the first digit of all your numbers will be a 1 about a third of the time, 2 is second most frequent, 3 is third and so on. And there’s a clear and consistent mathematical consistency that can use to analyse data sets to look for fraud. It’s even been used in law courts.
Actually, they’d notch a “score” in the original sense.
This is interesting, I did not know that. Thanks.
Beat me to it. Sheep are properly tallied in Angus units. As in “Build ye a whole viilage, but yet ye f*** one sheep and it’s ‘Angus the sheep-f***er’.” 
As to @Fiendish_Astronaut’ Benford’s comment:
That’s all about using positional notation for numbers which are sums or products of constituent numbers. It doesn’t apply to numbers which are samples on a range. Said another way, it’s an artifact of carry behavior. It’s an effect of how we write numbers, not of numbers themselves.
Roman numerals have a similar, but far more complex Benford-ish behavior as you total up groups of Xs and Is into Ls and Cs and Ms.
Thanks - I did wonder if I should just link to Wikipedia and let that do the explaining as my words were always likely to be a less-than perfect description. But I decided that was too lazy.
And indeed it makes sense that it should only apply to numbers that are sums or products of constituent numbers. For instance a data set of the ages of members of this board would obviously not conform to Benford’s Law.
A ‘tally’ is a stick. You mark it with notches and, yes, 20 is a score.
tally | Origin and meaning of tally by Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com)
Many languages have an odd iregularity in the name of one (or few) number. In English, it is eleven/twelve, which don/i follow the rest of the -teens. Which we borrowed from German. In Russian “sorok” (40) is the only ten-multiple not ending with “-syat”. In Spanish, 500 is “quinentos” instead if “cinco cientos”, five hundreds… . In French, 80 is"four twenties". There are many others.
Sorry, I should’ve explained more. The “score” is the notch or mark itself. That’s the original sense of the word. Later, the word became used for twenty (“four score and seven years”) or the sum (“what’s the score?”). The sense of marking with lines also led to a musical “score”.
You’re right about “tally”, but I’ll note that the Norse counting system used “score” explicitly; it’s their word. Tally is the French version.
I shall never hear the phrase “tally-ho” quite the same way ever again.
And I grew up in one of those areas. These days I can only remember up to four, but I also know twenty, so I presume at one time I could actually count to twenty. Looks like I knew what is described here as the Borrowdale version
-except I knew 20 as Jiggered - a word also meaning worn out, the inference being that by the time a Cumbrian had counted to twenty, he was exhausted. How much of that is a joke/dig I don’t know.
When I was growing up (the '60s, say) low numbers - one to four, I guess - were used in conversation. “Give us yan” (“May I have one”) was commonplace.
j
I have a vague recollection of at least some of Yan Tan Tethera counting appearing in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books.
@Morgyn I believe it was used by the Nac Mac Feegle. Rob Anybody and his fellow pictsies chant it as they lift up a cow, IIRC. Perhaps in Carpe Jugulum.
You mean “steal a wee coo beastie.”