Romance languages share a historical and consistent construction for numbers eleven through nineteen
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REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
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The retrieved linguistic discussions and number word comparisons show that Romance languages do not share a consistent construction for numbers eleven through nineteen, as different languages feature varying cut-off patterns.
# Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French number words from eleven to nineteen - history of a bizarre, inconsistent construction
Tags: historical-linguistics, language-change, comparative-linguistics, romance-languages, numerals
- Score: 17
- Views: 3492
- Answers: 1
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: randomatlabuser (271 rep)
- Asked: 2014-01-12
- Edited: 2020-06-17
- Site: linguistics
## Question
Following Sklivvz's advice, I propose here a question I made in Italian Language. Because I am not sure how I should do this, I will just copy/paste the whole lot.
Let's count in Latin from one to twenty:
ūnus/ūna/ūnum, duo/duae/duo, trēs/tria, quattuor, quīnque, sex, septem, octō, novem, decem,
ūndecim, duodecim, tredecim, quattuordecim, quīndecim, sēdecim, septendecim, duodēvīgintī, ūndēvīgintī, vīgintī
As pointed out by symbiotech, "octodecim" and "novemdecim" were also used in Latin, but they didn't survive. On the other hand, as pointed out by martina, "dĕcem (et) sĕptem" was also a common form for "septemdĕcim".
In Attic Greek it was:
ΕΙΣ/ΜΙΑ/ΕΝ (heis/mia/en), ΔΥΟ (dúō), ΤΡΕΙΣ/ΤΡΙΑ (treis/tria), ΤΕΤΤΑΡΕΣ/ΤΕΤΤΑΡΑ (téttares/téttara), ΠΕΝΤΕ (pénte), ΕΞ (héx), ΕΠΤΑ (heptá), ΟΚΤΩ
# Why do different languages have different amounts of unique words for numbers between 10 and 20?
Tags: morphology, numbers
- Score: 25
- Views: 2686
- Answers: 2
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: Sergoetgrim
- Asked: 2013-05-31
- Edited: 2013-05-31
- Site: linguistics
## Question
I've read a similar question here which mainly dealt with why English only has eleven and twelve as unique words with some interesting ideas. But my question is why do different languages have different cut-off points for unique words. Here I am using unique just to mean words which follow a different pattern to simply number + the word for ten, or which are formed differently to the other numbers between 10 and 20. French for example goes up to 16 before saying 10-7, 10-8 etc. and I just found out that Spanish and Portuguese go up to 15.
Checking online I can see that Catalan and Italian follow French, going up to 16, while German, Dutch and Nordic languages follow English and stop at 12 . Greek also acts similarly and has 11 and 12 with different forms to the other numbers. Gaelic, Romanian and Hungarian have no unique words between 10 and 20. Finnish and Czech appear to also have no unique words (or al
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