The numbers from twenty to ninety are multiples of ten. In English they end with -ty, a suffix that was -tig in Old English and meant ten. Let us analyze the multiples of ten in English.
The numbers sixty, seventy and ninety contain the words six, seven and nine. The number eighty contains the word eight, but eighty is written with only one t instead of two. The number forty has no u even though it is present in the word fourteen.
It is clear that the spelling of the numbers twenty, thirty and fifty does not include the numbers two, three and five. They reflect that languages are not completely regular. In the word twenty, the w is pronounced, but in two, it is not.
English multiples of ten are formed with two parts. The first is the number and the second is the suffix -ty. Other Germanic languages form multiples of ten similarly. The number ninety is neunzig in German, negentig in Dutch, nittio in Swedish and nitti in Norwegian. Though the multiples of ten do not include the word ten, the suffix -ty was -tig in Old English, and it meant ten.
No comments:
Post a Comment