• garden_boi@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Literally every single point listed by @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works applies 100% identically to German. Could you explain how English is less consistent than German?

    • Naeron@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      9 months ago

      English has four-teen fif-teen etc. up until twenty and from that point forward has the decade in front of the single number twenty-one. In contrast to German which at least Always has the single digit in front of the decade

      • thekidxp@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        To be fair English has a lot of German. The “teen” sound almost certainly comes from the sound “zehn”. It’s pretty easy to hear how fünfzehn und sechszehn eventually become fifteen and sixteen. We’re more or less saying five ten just kinda mushed together.

        • samus12345@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          More accurately, modern English and German come from the same root. A Proto-Germanic word for 15 developed into “fünfzehn” in German and “fifteen” in English.

      • garden_boi@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        🤯 Didn’t notice that one! Yes, that’s indeed more irregular in English!

    • Wilzax@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Literally only because of “teen/ten” difference. Everything else matches up, except that the roles of the cardinal stem (three) and the ordinal stem (thir) are swapped in 13 and 30 for German

      Three, thirteen, thirty, third vs Drei, Dreizehn, Dreißig, Dritte

      Used 3 as an example because it’s the most irregular out of the 9 non-zero digits in German