German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.
Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.
We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa).
Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."
Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.
As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.
English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences.
I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.
I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.
> (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.
German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".
Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.
Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to 20, and then start saying “one”, “two”, until I get to thirty to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word for 21, 22, etc is “one-twenty”, “two-twenty”, etc, rather than “twenty-one” etc.
Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying “it’s ten for half five” means it’s 4:20. (I think?) I’m really not sure I’ll ever have a solid understanding.
Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.
There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote out numbers the same was German does.
The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her
purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find:
"About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation, although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current that it's totally understandable in a way.
When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn. I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these things I never got to learn this language, my brain just refused to memorise these rules :/
Opened this thread to say exactly this. It wasn't a problem for me before I started using English regularly, but in the past few years, I've been getting German numbers wrong more and more often. It's just so confusing and I have to consciously think about it every time.
There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German.
I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find:
About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.
Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still traumatized growing up with this problem.
I was a bit unsatisfied by the top answer which mostly seemed to be a reaction to the connotations of the word ‘backwards’ rather than a discussion of the history which was tacked on at the end.
I think the answer is that languages didn’t traditionally have base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting, and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think, 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think). So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1] question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new arithmetic system and people don’t really notice the vestiges of the old systems much.
[1] I don’t want to say that the question is bad but rather that without the historical context it seems like a question more specific to German than something like “why do adjectives come before the noun in English and after it in French” which ends up with an answer that is roughly general history plus “that’s just how it happened”.
I personally liked the reply further down the stack that said the German order is more useful in context of counting. You put the digit that changes with every count first and the one that stays the same for a while second (or mention it only when it changes). Because you don't typical count methodically like this if the number of things counted is large, this system only obtains for two-digit numbers. This is just a hypothesis, but I thought it was the most interesting answer.
All the top answers are similarly awful, just smug bleating and ignoring the question. If someone doesn't know the etymological history, they shouldn't say anything!
Used to be like that in Norway. Some older people will still say "two-and-forty", "eight-and-seventy", instead of "forty-two", "seventy-eight", etc.
In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.
This change was called "The new counting method", and describes how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.
Sound a bit inconsistent - why weren't 10 - 20 also changed? Would have been great to have a language that's consistent all the way through as far as counting is concerned :)
Back when the Spanish had driven the Moors south monks were picking over the wonderful libraries they had left behind, one of the treasures they discovered was what we now call arabic numbers - but they screwed up, they took the numbers as they saw them whole into their writing system. They took numbers meant to be written in a right to left writing system into a left to right system without reversing them.
Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in business - when you add numbers together the result can be written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space for the answer to fit into.
But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness - took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the original arabic way of doing it was right
Counterpoint: when talking or skimming text, the exact number is often not especially important to most of the audience, but the most significant digit or two are.
If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.
I'm no historian, but that explanation doesn't make sense to me, for two reasons:
* Pre-decimal numeral systems in use at that time (Roman/Greek/whatever numerals) were already written biggest-left to smallest-right, and had been so for more than a thousand years.
* Arabic numerals were invented in India, and Indian languages are written left-to-right.
On the other hand, network byte order is big endian, so now we typically have a little endian devices converting to and from big endian to talk to each other.
In general, languages differ in syntactic structure on the level of word order. For example, in Latin, word order a bit free form, things could be moved around quite a bit and still make sense to the listener. Probably allowed for some interesting creativity and poetics.
In English, I would say about a book, "the book on the table". In another language, it may be "the on-the-table book."
There's even a slight semantic difference where the later example somewhat directly gives the book the property of being "on-the-table". IIRC from my school days, that example resembles Japanese construction, but please someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a long time since my comp ling course work.
Interestingly Norwegian used to spell out numbers in the same order as German, but reformed this in the 1950s when telephone numbers became widespread:
I guess having a dedicated Språkrådet to oversee the development of the Norwegian language and a single broadcasting service(NRK) made the roll-out of this possible.
Actually, this is a modern thing. In the old German language (pre-1800) the numbers were spelled in the correct order in the areas where Hochdeutsch was spoken, with the single digit being at the end.
Also some early books from the era directly after the 30 jaehrige Krieg still use the different way of spelling numbers (e.g. from Eva Hartner comes to mind).
Einhundert-Zwanzig-und-Eins is still a number everybody understands, and it is also accepted in written form on bank transfer checks.
So I'd say just go ahead and use it this way :) the more people use this way of spelling numbers, the more likely it is that the language will adapt and change (back).
“Four and twenty blackbirds baked in pie” is a line from English nursery rhyme. Also two score and ten meaning 50 is not that old. At some point fairly recently English must have changed to the current system. Until the 1960’s there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a British pound sterling (240 pence).
It is because little endian-ness in speech allowed market makers to trade faster. If you have a commodity that's trading at around 24 or 25, there's no point in waiting to hear about the 20, you just care about the 4 or the 5. This allowed the HFTs of the old world to trade super fast and the rest of society adopted it as a result.
Just kidding.
Number systems in different languages get pretty weird. I still have people asking my why in Danish, 50 (halvtreds), 70 (halvfjerds), and 90 (halvfems) seem to have the word "half" in them, and it's half of 60 (tres) or 80 (firs) but not 100. The reason is the number system in the top half of the hundreds actually counts in 20s (snes) but that old word is basically never used anymore. So 70 is half a 20 to having four 20s, which got shortened (fire snes -> firs). Similarly 90 is half of a snes towards 5 20s, which we prefer to call a hundred.
There is some hope though. Swedish and Norwegian are reformed, despite also being closely related to German.
I did read a popsci piece about the effect on numbers on kids learning times tables. Chinese numbering seems much more sensible. 15 is just ten-five, 52 is just five-ten-two (Vietnamese as well). In that way perhaps it directly encodes the place value system that kids need to learn, whereas naming it "two and half of the score on the way to the third" is just confusing. Personally I sometimes do times tables in Cantonese, it seems to recall a lot faster than doing it in English and certainly Danish. If you think about it, the ten in the middle is just a constant, so you are only remembering two sounds. Also there's no converting between the tens version of the number (fifty) and five. The whole table is just combinations of the basic 1-9, with nothing in the units if it's divisible by 10.
I find that in German you often have to wait for the end of a complete sentence, often including a couple of subordinate clauses, to have a clue what is going on. Let's just say that backwards numbers are the least of my problems living in Bavaria.
The German word for that is Bandwurmsatz (“tapeworm sentence”, because it goes on and on and on). Native speakers likely have a higher threshold for calling a sentence that than foreigners.
French is not actually that weird; it's just weird from 80-99. From 10-79, it's just like English handles it. They just never came up with single words for 80 and 90.
Have you checked Malagasy? We read the numbers totally backwards although we've switched to the Latin alphabet like 200 years ago... It's sometimes so inconvenient for everyday life, especially for large amounts, that we end up counting in _French_ instead. For numbers 11 to 99, we also use casual abbreviations like (I translated) "one with two" for 21; or "seven with three" for 37, but reading large numbers from 10,000 upwards (mostly Malagasy currency) with the left-to-right writing system is tedious.
As the comments point out, our counting system in English does precisely the same sort of thing, often: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, etc., all name the ones digit before the tens. And because of logic and ease of counting relatively small numbers of things. You can tell this is the reason since, once you get over 20, all this reverses: twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, etc.
It's the same pattern in French. Under 20: douze, treize, quatorze, quinze. Over 20: vingt et un, vingt-deux, vingt-trois, vingt-quatre, etc.
I find it more curious that the languages I know best tend to have special words for 11 and 12 that don't follow the same logic as the rest. Eleven and twelve instead of one-teen, two-teen or something. And that even leads to things like a teenager being age 13+. In German it's the same elf + zwölf and then it continues with dreizehn, vierzehn etc. My guess is that it is somehow related to the fact that a dozen is a thing but I'm curious where it comes from. In French it goes all the way up to 16 (onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize) before we end up with dix-sept for 17. French has always been the most peculiar to me as there's stuff like 82 being quatre-vingt-deux (4*20+12). And then there's languages like Vietnamese that happily start with 10+1 from the get go (mười một, mười hai, mười ba). Fascinating stuff :)
That form of counting is still understood, recognised, but viewed as archaic in England.
I guess it got lost in the evolution of Old English to Middle English, and the interplay of Old Norse plus the subsequent influence of Norman French, all of which bashed the Germanic core of of English in to its modern form.
> There are many more languages that speak or read (some of) their numbers "backwards", among them Greek, Latin (both directions possible), Celtic languages etc., and of course languages that actually read right to left like Arabic, where our written numbers come from
Ironically, in Arabic numbers are written left to right, just like in the west, reflecting that they were borrowed from India, whose indigenous writing systems are also ltr. It goes to show that not only is there not a "correct" order to express numbers, but the spoken order need not reflect the written order.
[+] [-] chrizel|4 years ago|reply
Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.
[+] [-] moffkalast|4 years ago|reply
German: einhundertfünfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy)
Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy)
Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring languages:
Polish: sto siedemdziesiąt pięć (one hundred seventy five)
Czech: sto sedmdesát pět (one hundred seventy five)
Slovak: sto sedemdesiat päť (one hundred seventy five)
Hungarian: száz hetven öt (one hundred seventy five)
Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five)
Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five)
Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic
You get the idea.
Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system.
Sincerely, a Slovenian.
[+] [-] logifail|4 years ago|reply
We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa).
Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."
[+] [-] VortexDream|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|4 years ago|reply
English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences.
I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.
I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|4 years ago|reply
German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".
Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.
[+] [-] umpalumpaaa|4 years ago|reply
Zwanzigeins could mean 20 1 or 21. The only thing that differentiates “20 1” from “21” is the duration of the delay between 20 and 1…
[+] [-] FredPret|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.
[+] [-] DonaldFisk|4 years ago|reply
The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find:
"About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
[+] [-] otagekki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefandesu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonaldFisk|4 years ago|reply
I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find:[+] [-] ajmurmann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan-robertson|4 years ago|reply
I think the answer is that languages didn’t traditionally have base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting, and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think, 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think). So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1] question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new arithmetic system and people don’t really notice the vestiges of the old systems much.
[1] I don’t want to say that the question is bad but rather that without the historical context it seems like a question more specific to German than something like “why do adjectives come before the noun in English and after it in French” which ends up with an answer that is roughly general history plus “that’s just how it happened”.
[+] [-] DFHippie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juped|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.
This change was called "The new counting method", and describes how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.
[+] [-] qayxc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|4 years ago|reply
Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in business - when you add numbers together the result can be written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space for the answer to fit into.
But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness - took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the original arabic way of doing it was right
[+] [-] Zak|4 years ago|reply
If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.
[+] [-] pezezin|4 years ago|reply
* Pre-decimal numeral systems in use at that time (Roman/Greek/whatever numerals) were already written biggest-left to smallest-right, and had been so for more than a thousand years. * Arabic numerals were invented in India, and Indian languages are written left-to-right.
[+] [-] jefftk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidkunz|4 years ago|reply
3 482 975 is "dreimillionenvierhundertzweiundachzigtausendneunhundertfünfundsiebzig"
which is in pseudo English:
"three million four hundred two and eighty thousand nine hundred five and seventy"
Also beware of (German -> English):
Million -> million
Milliarde -> billion
Billion -> trillion
Billiarde -> quadrillion
etc.
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
In general, languages differ in syntactic structure on the level of word order. For example, in Latin, word order a bit free form, things could be moved around quite a bit and still make sense to the listener. Probably allowed for some interesting creativity and poetics.
In English, I would say about a book, "the book on the table". In another language, it may be "the on-the-table book."
There's even a slight semantic difference where the later example somewhat directly gives the book the property of being "on-the-table". IIRC from my school days, that example resembles Japanese construction, but please someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a long time since my comp ling course work.
[+] [-] ginko|4 years ago|reply
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_nye_tellem%C3%A5ten
I guess having a dedicated Språkrådet to oversee the development of the Norwegian language and a single broadcasting service(NRK) made the roll-out of this possible.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|4 years ago|reply
Also some early books from the era directly after the 30 jaehrige Krieg still use the different way of spelling numbers (e.g. from Eva Hartner comes to mind).
Einhundert-Zwanzig-und-Eins is still a number everybody understands, and it is also accepted in written form on bank transfer checks.
So I'd say just go ahead and use it this way :) the more people use this way of spelling numbers, the more likely it is that the language will adapt and change (back).
[+] [-] willyt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
Just kidding.
Number systems in different languages get pretty weird. I still have people asking my why in Danish, 50 (halvtreds), 70 (halvfjerds), and 90 (halvfems) seem to have the word "half" in them, and it's half of 60 (tres) or 80 (firs) but not 100. The reason is the number system in the top half of the hundreds actually counts in 20s (snes) but that old word is basically never used anymore. So 70 is half a 20 to having four 20s, which got shortened (fire snes -> firs). Similarly 90 is half of a snes towards 5 20s, which we prefer to call a hundred.
There is some hope though. Swedish and Norwegian are reformed, despite also being closely related to German.
I did read a popsci piece about the effect on numbers on kids learning times tables. Chinese numbering seems much more sensible. 15 is just ten-five, 52 is just five-ten-two (Vietnamese as well). In that way perhaps it directly encodes the place value system that kids need to learn, whereas naming it "two and half of the score on the way to the third" is just confusing. Personally I sometimes do times tables in Cantonese, it seems to recall a lot faster than doing it in English and certainly Danish. If you think about it, the ten in the middle is just a constant, so you are only remembering two sounds. Also there's no converting between the tens version of the number (fifty) and five. The whole table is just combinations of the basic 1-9, with nothing in the units if it's divisible by 10.
[+] [-] emsy|4 years ago|reply
What a terrible way to start an answer.
[+] [-] globalise83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkurz|4 years ago|reply
Seemed unlikely, apparently the ground truth has moved more through the ages than I expected. Lo, the "long hundred": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_hundred.
[+] [-] folli|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan-robertson|4 years ago|reply
What is 20*4?
Answer: 80 because multiplication is commutative.
[+] [-] Bud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwolfi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orthoxerox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lamad123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otagekki|4 years ago|reply
Have you checked Malagasy? We read the numbers totally backwards although we've switched to the Latin alphabet like 200 years ago... It's sometimes so inconvenient for everyday life, especially for large amounts, that we end up counting in _French_ instead. For numbers 11 to 99, we also use casual abbreviations like (I translated) "one with two" for 21; or "seven with three" for 37, but reading large numbers from 10,000 upwards (mostly Malagasy currency) with the left-to-right writing system is tedious.
[+] [-] Bud|4 years ago|reply
It's the same pattern in French. Under 20: douze, treize, quatorze, quinze. Over 20: vingt et un, vingt-deux, vingt-trois, vingt-quatre, etc.
[+] [-] masteruvpuppetz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sva_|4 years ago|reply
It's pretty hand-wavey but still interesting speculation.
[+] [-] j7ake|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfawcus|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
That form of counting is still understood, recognised, but viewed as archaic in England.
I guess it got lost in the evolution of Old English to Middle English, and the interplay of Old Norse plus the subsequent influence of Norman French, all of which bashed the Germanic core of of English in to its modern form.
[+] [-] danans|4 years ago|reply
Ironically, in Arabic numbers are written left to right, just like in the west, reflecting that they were borrowed from India, whose indigenous writing systems are also ltr. It goes to show that not only is there not a "correct" order to express numbers, but the spoken order need not reflect the written order.