• RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Dutch also has that problem, it causes so many errors.

    Old English used to have the same problem ( https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Numbers ), but at one point they must have seen the light, probably some time after they were conquered by the french in 1066. I do remember reading a Charles Dickens story where a person said a number with tens and ones in the reverse order and I wonder when it finally died out completely in English (if it ever did, maybe it’s still in use in some dialects).

    Edit: thirteen, fourteen, … There’s still commonly used remnants of this reverse order in English, we’ll never get rid of this insanity :)