I was getting caught up on the New Yorker, reading an article about math and the human brain, and came across this fascinating passage:
Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19, and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.†French is just as bad, with vestigial base-twenty monstrosities, like quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (“four twenty ten nineâ€) for 99. Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numerals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen. And the advantages extend to adults. Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvellously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)
Sometimes my lover and I amuse ourselves by counting in a base other than ten (I know, aren’t we wild?).
Another argument in favor of Experanto!
unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok nau, dek, dekunu, dekdu, dektri, dekkvar, dekkvin, dekses, deksep, dekok, deknau, dudek, dudek unu…
:)
I was just reading that article last night. Totally fascinating! Good to know that I can just blame my brain wiring for my poor simple-math skills, LOL. ;)
My Polish family members have arguments like this about the English language in general all the time. How certain things in English don’t make sense and aren’t logical (silent e’s, double L’s, etc.). Their argument is that Polish is better \ a smarter language because it’s more phonetic and logical, but you can also say that because English is more complicated that it takes a smarter person to learn it… The numbers in Polish are pretty similar to the ones in English, though, except instead of unique words for eleven, twelve, and thirteen, Polish has “oneteen”, “twoteen”, “threeteen”.
True, but Polish numbers handle nouns in weird ways, with special collective forms and what-not.
Polish nouns are also declined in six cases and three genders (with separate rules differentiating masculine animate nouns from masculine inanimate nouns). Then there’s the aspectual verb system, consonant mutations, and so forth.
I don’t understand the “stupid Pole” jokes. Every Pole can speak Polish fluently, which is no small feat.