What number is highest before using a form of "ten and _____"?

In English, we get up to 12 before we say “thirteen”, which is an obvious reference to ten. What number, presumably in a foreign language, is the highest “distinct” number that doesn’t reference another number. I’m not talking about “hundred”, “thousand” etc because they’re higher than 13, which used the “ten and ___” form.

IE. If 13 were actually pronounced “blerg”, 14 was “snork”, and 15 was “fifteen” then snork would be the highest.

French goes up to 16 (sieze) before using (dix-sept/10-7) for 17.

Things get funky at 70 and up, but that’s another story.

Spanish uses distinct words up through 15, while 16 is “ten and six”. So not as high as French but higher than English.

There’s the Shepherd’s Count, yan, tan, etc. Many localized variants exist, but most of them get up to twenty (“score”) before they start in on compound constructions.

And of course, there are number systems based on bases other than 10, but I assume we’re not considering those, because a base 12 (say) system will still have compounds, just based on the word for twelve instead of the word for ten.

EDIT: And of course I looked it up after posting, instead of before. It looks like the usual pattern is actually “dick” or something like it for ten, then “yanadick”, “tanadick”, etc. So those actually start compounding earlier than standard English numbers.

I would consider those to fit the narrative if they were actually numbers accepted by a culture that used a different base system and not something like hex where we just start using letters instead.

If you take one of those languages that do not have numerals (Pirahã), count by naming body parts (Foi), does not use base 10 (Ngiti, Ndom, Chocho, Skou…), and other such things, then you never use a form of “ten + n”.

NB I am not going to argue that “eleven” (one left) and “twelve” (two left) are actually compounding, but there is a non-obvious reference to ten, it just is not mentioned.

Mayan numerals are base-20 rather than base-10, so you get up to twenty with standalone words for numbers before 21 starts the series of words that are compounds of the words for other numbers.

The highest distinct number in German is 12 (zwölf) same as English. After that they use dreizehn (literally threeten), etc.

That’s because they’re both Germanic languages. Other languages of the family, such as Dutch and Swedish, follow the same pattern.

What do we make of Hindi number words? There seem to be patterns, but with a lot of degradation. Superficially, it seems like numbers up to 99 pretty much have to be memorized.

I had thought that might be true about Mayan number names because of the base 20 thing, but your citation doesn’t support that. The names from 12 through 19 are just the number minus 10, suffixed with “lajun” (ten):

2 = ka’, 12 = ka’alajun
3 = óox, 13 = óoxlajun
4 = kan, 14 = kanlajun
5 = jo’o, 15 = jo’olajun
etc.

I was once told that Nepali is like that too. I couldn’t verify with a quick Google but both derive from Sanskrit so it makes sense.

The Germanic names of 11 and 12 implicitly reference ten and explicitly reference one and two, respectively. For example, English eleven means “[ten and] one left [over]” and twelve means “[ten and] two left [over].”