Updated 3 months ago
Why does English say “eleven” and “twelve” instead of *oneteen and *twoteen?
It’s because early Germanic languages had or were influenced by a base-12 (duodecimal) counting system!
One piece of evidence for this is that in Old Norse the word “hundrað” meant ‘120’ (twelve groups of ten instead of ten groups of ten).
This influenced English usage as well: the English word “hundred” could still be used to mean ‘120’ until the 1400s! Today 120 is called a “long hundred” instead.
A second piece of evidence is that in the earliest texts written in Germanic languages (such as the Gothic Bible), there are notes in the margins explaining to readers that certain numbers should be read “tenty-wise”, or in the base-10 counting system. These notes wouldn’t be necessary in a society that already consistently counted by tens.
𐍄𐌰𐌹𐌷𐌿𐌽𐍄𐌴𐍅𐌾𐌰𐌼
taihuntēwjam
‘tenty-wise’
The final piece of evidence comes from the words “eleven” and “twelve” themselves. In Proto-Germanic, these words were *ainalif ‘one left’ and *twalif ‘two left’, in the sense of ‘one left over (after ten)’ and ‘two left over (after ten)’. This style of counting past the base is called *overcounting*.
The reason overcounting in English stops at 12 is probably because of that early base-12 influence. *ainalif eventually became “eleven” and *twalif eventually became “twelve”.
Read more about the fascinating connections to the English word “one” in this issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter:
https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/one
