Irish Numbers

Irish is an Indo-European language of the Celtic language family. Though it is an Indo-European language, it is nevertheless quite different from languages such as English and French. To demonstrate, here are the numbers from one to ten:

1) a haon
2) a dó
3) a trí
4) a ceathair
5) a cúig
6) a sé
7) a seacht
8) a hocht
9) a naoi
10)a deich

All of these numbers are written as two words. The number one has the "o" and "n" of English. The number two looks similar. It has a "d" instead of the "t" of English. The number three also looks similar to English. The number four does not look similar to the number four in English, but looks a little like the French number "quatre." The number five does not look similar to English but shares some similarity with the French number "cinq." The numbers six and seven both start with an "s", the same as English. The number eight also ends with a "t" and actually looks closer to the French word for eight which is "huit." The numbers nine and ten do not look so similar to English but nine also starts with a nasal and ten has a "d" instead of a "t" as in English.

Most of the Irish numbers from one to ten are not so similar to those of English, but a few, two and three, share many similarities. In a number of cases such as four and eight, the Irish numbers are actually more similar to those of French than those of English. From an analysis of the Irish numbers, one can see that Irish is an Indo-European language, but not a language that is very similar to English. For this reason, it is a Celtic language and not a closely-related Germanic language such as German, Dutch and Danish.