33. The Numbers We Live By

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 33.

The Numbers We Live By

Why isn't eleven "oneteen", and why isn't a billion the Czech bilion?

Numbers look like the most exact part of a language, but they too carry the memory of old ways of counting, trading and naming the world.

One left over, two left over

Why do the numbers 11 and 12 have their own names in English, while thirteen already contains -teen? Eleven is connected with an old Germanic compound meaning roughly "one left over above ten", and twelve "two left over above ten". This is not a random eccentric spelling, but an ancient construction that time has shortened and changed.

We find related forms in German too: elf and zwölf. English, meanwhile, has kept an uneven boundary: from thirteen on it uses more regular forms. Speakers long ago saw no problem in this – their system grew naturally and did not have to be perfectly symmetrical.

Teen and ty: two relatives with different jobs

The suffix -teen is connected with an old word for ten: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The suffix -ty, on the other hand, makes the tens: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. They are historically close, but in modern English they have different functions.

The difference can be clearly heard in pronunciation: thirTEEN is usually stressed on the second part, while THIRty is stressed on the first. In everyday speech, however, the stress can change with the context. Telling thirteen and thirty apart carefully is far more important for students in practice than remembering a thousand-year-old etymology.

The number twelve did not disappear, because it divides well

Twelve is special in everyday life. We have a dozen, twelve months, the traditional twelve hours on a clock face, and in older systems of measurement many units based on twelve. Twelve can be divided by two, three, four and six with nothing left over.

Dozen came into English from French dozaine, which is connected with Latin duodecim, "twelve". Besides the dozen there is also score, an older word for twenty, known today mainly from historical texts and fixed phrases. So alongside the decimal system, number words also keep remains of other practical traditions.

Million: once just a "big thousand"

The word million came into English through French from Italian milione, originally formed from mille, "thousand". As the needs of trade and mathematics grew, ever larger numbers had to be named.

For a Czech student this brings an especially dangerous trap: English billion today normally means 1,000,000,000, that is, the Czech miliarda. The Czech word bilion means 1,000,000,000,000, which corresponds to trillion in modern everyday English. Historically there were different scales for naming large numbers, so in older British texts you may come across a different meaning of billion.

Why doesn't forty have a U?

In English we write four and fourteen, but forty – not fourty. Irregularities like this come from the historical development of sounds and spelling. We use numbers extremely often, so old forms have a good chance of surviving even when other rules become regular.

There are also differences between varieties in writing: for example British one hundred and five versus the more common American one hundred five. But the basic grammar rule is the same: two hundred, three thousand, not two hundreds or three thousands when giving an exact number. On the other hand, hundreds of people refers to an unspecified number of hundreds.

Numbers in life are not just maths

When an American says a billion dollars, a European listener must correctly imagine a miliarda, not a bilion. When a student does not distinguish thirteen and thirty, they can get a house number or a price wrong. And when they read a historical text, the word score may reveal that the language used to have other fixed units too.

Numbers remind us of one essential thing: the mathematical value is exact, but its name in words is a historical agreement. Numbers are universal. Words for numbers certainly are not.