LINGUISTS DO NOT INTERACT
man why don’t we say onety five for fifteen. can we get a little consistency here
apparently they are ultimately derived from the (reconstructed) proto-germanic *ainalif and *twalif, meaning "one left" and "two left", as in "one/two left over after counting to ten"
neat!
Last night I was talking about how they made us re learn multiplication in base 5 to better be able to teach it to kids (I planned to teach high school math after I returned to college as an adult to finish my degree - I did not pursue that master's, and I work in tech now) and how mind-blowing that was, and I was explaining that "we don't even like, have a word for ten, it just means the next digit up" and I blew out my own gourd a little thinking about that
