The pattern seems to be peculiar to the Germanic languages. Though German and Dutch match it, French and the other Romance tongues don’t (French, for example, has unique words up as far as seventeen). Note, though, that this pattern isn’t by any means universal even among European languages. So why didn’t people talk about “three left over” and so on? It seems that once they had got past the magic twelve, people swapped to counting in a more direct way. Similarly twelve is from Old English words that meant “two left over”. It’s made up of two words that mean “one left over”, that is, after one has counted ten, there’s one remaining. The oldest form of eleven in English is endleofan (which appears in King Alfred’s translation from the Latin of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History).
#Names of numbers in different languages plus#
So ten plus one and ten plus two were special numbers, not quite in the same situation as ten plus three or the higher examples. A computer cannot really understand an assembly program directly.
#Names of numbers in different languages code#
An assembly language is almost exactly like the machine code that a computer can understand, except that it uses words in place of numbers. It may also in part be tied up with the idea of the dual number, in which things were classed as one, two, or many (singular, dual, plural) Old English had a dual number, as do other languages. An assembly language is a programming language that can be used to directly tell the computer what to do. The posh name for it is the duodecimal system think of 12 inches to the foot or 12 pence to the shilling in old British money and the way that items even now can be counted out by dozens or by the gross. That’s probably because people a thousand years ago didn’t necessarily think in tens all the time, but often preferred twelves. ( Thirteen is actually a modified form of threeteen, a word that existed at one time, though written as threteen.)Īs you say, eleven and twelve don’t fit this neat system. Still counting the number of numbers after the first number (in this case, after the 6 there are 11 numbers) you need to include the ones that are not zero in the formula, but after a decimal point. If you were following the rule of such numbers strictly, you ought to count oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, fourteen, and so on. When large numbers have many different decimals in them, such as 642 500 000 000, naming them with scientific notation is about the same, but with one difference. Where did those words originate?Ī The ending -teen is just an old form of ten, so that sixteen is “six-ten” or “six plus ten”. Why are eleven and twelve so named? Why not eleventeen and twelveteen? She had a point. I asked why? She returned with a really tough one. © 1989 - 2022 Ideal Education Group S.L.Q From Tony: My wife is Japanese and we were discussing why Japanese have 10 different names for the same number. Hindi: The official language of India, accent and dialect differs with different regions but almost every Indian has a working knowledge of Hindi. Even when there are some exceptions in the way to form them, their construction follows rules that will allow students to learn them easily. 70 percent of the States population speak Gujrathi but it the most spread language not only in India but also abroad. The Spanish numbers are not difficult to learn. In Spain a billón is one million millions, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon system, a billion is one thousand millions.Īlso opposite to the Anglo-Saxon system is the fact that in Spain the “.” symbol is used to separate thousands and “,” to indicate decimals.ģ.537,52 € is equal to three thousand five hundred thirty-seven euros and fifty-two cents. One curiosity is the small difference between the Spanish numerical systems and the Anglo-Saxon one. The Indo-Arabic numerical system is still used today and is the base of significant scientific development and universal mathematics. One example of this was the very precise Mayan numerical system. With the expanding European empires, the number system spread throughout the West, substituting local number systems such as those found in Latin America. Towards the year 1500, the system was already in place and used clearly in mathematical texts. In Spain, this numeration system appeared in manuscripts as early as 976 AD. Table 11.1 Digit span and sound duration in a number of languages Language Digit span Mean number of syllables per digit name Rapid sound duration ( msec. Middle East, introduced the Indo-Arabic system to Europe. In the 8th century, Leonardo de Pisa, who had traveled through the Counting (1-100) in different languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, English, Ewe, Ga and Twi. In Spain, for many centuries the Roman numeration system dominated.