this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 31 points 11 months ago (22 children)

Man and here I thought the English system was kinda screwy, where at first it's in base 12 and base 20 at the same time what with having special unique names for all digits up to twelve, and then thirteen through nineteen are also uniquely weird, then at twenty we decide "man fuck that" and then it's in base 10 until we repeat that pattern every 100, ie "one hundred seventeen." Or then we occasionally do stupid things like "seventeen hundred" instead of "one thousand seven hundred."

It just now hit me that "teenager" is an inherently English construct because that weird partial second decade we have. I'm curious, how does that work in languages? Like, in French they have special words up to 16 and only do "ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine." You spend seven years as a teenager in England but only three in France.

[–] ahnesampo@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In Finnish, the numbers 11–19 are (the number for 1–9) + “toista”, lit. “of the second (ten)”. So 11 is yksitoista, “one of the second (ten)”. That system is only used for 11–19. Bigger than that is tens + number, e.g. 21 kaksikymmentä yksi (two tens and one).

The Finnish word for “teen” is “teini”, which is a loanword from English. The native word for a person that’s not a child nor an adult is “nuori” lit. “a young”.

[–] Rouxibeau@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Japanese is 1 (ichi), 2 (ni), ...,10 (juu), 10+1 (juu-ichi), 10+2 (juu-ni), ..., 21 (ni-juu-ichi)..., 92 (kyu-juu-ni)..., 100 (hyaku)

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 0 points 11 months ago

Yeah, the numbers look all nice and orderly in the abstract until you need to use them for something in the real world...

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