Numbering
April 21, 2008
I don’t know what got me into this line of thought, but I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t make sense that we should be saying: “Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen…”, etc., instead of “Ten, Ten-One, Ten-Two, Ten-Three…”. I mean, for every number except those in the range of Ten – Nineteen (10 – 19), we follow the standard of concatenating the following number’s name to the (suitably modified) higher order number’s name.
44 = Forty + Four = Forty-Four
523 = Five + Twenty + Three = Five Twenty Three
But 14 is NOT Ten + Four = Ten-Four (which has a totally different conventional meaning), but it’s Fourteen!
Even within the 10 – 19 range, standards aren’t maintained. 14, 16, 17, 18, 19 are the names of the numbers followed by ‘teen’. 13 and 15 are similar in that the letters are modified in both to make them sound similar. 3 (Three) is modified to make it Thir-teen, and 5 (Five) to Fif-teen. 12 (Twelve) shares the first two letters with Two and 11 (Eleven) doesn’t have any obvious relation to 1 or 10!
Sigh… It would have been so straight-forward if I could just say ‘Ten-Seven’ during roll-call instead of a ‘Seventeen’ (which sounds so much like ‘Seventy’). I hate having to say it again, all because some idiot who came up with numbers didn’t bother doing his work properly.
8-|
Ah, those silly ancestors! They’d have probably thought that they would need only quite a few numbers, and set about giving them each their own sweet pet name (like the very un-systematic ‘eleven’ for instance) before they realized their counting needs. Old names die hard.
There’s a similar anomaly in malayalam too. ‘Onpathu’ for nine, ‘thonnooru’ for ninety and ‘thollayiram’ for nine-hundred. It took some time to understand the (il)logic.
nice thought yaar… nobody would ever think about numbers in such a dimension.. keep it up..
I am visiting your website for the first time and am very much impressed and what i can say is ..CONGRATS..
At the risk of posting below an incredibly gay comment, I’d like to point out that small numbers are more frequently used than larger ones, hence differentiating something in which the lower place value precedes is easier than the one in which the lower place value succeeds. Four-teen when pronounced vaguely has a much better chance of identification that Ten-Four.
And besides, Ten-xx numbers are already used for several codes.
Ten-Four means OK. You can see all these cops yelling “Ten-Four, Ten-Four!”
And don’t get me started about Ten-Hut in PT class.