this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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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
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.
🤯 Didn't notice that one! Yes, that's indeed more irregular in English!