| Hindi/Marathi are not easy, you almost have to memorize the numbers 1-100. Hindi and Marathi both have dedicated names for the tens (11, 12, 13, ...) and after that numbers are named in the reverse order of their digits. E.g. 45 will be five - forty. _except_ the word for five will be different from the word for five in, say, 75. Similarly, the word for "fifty" in the fifties is different for many of them. There's a lot of variation which you basically don't realize if you speak these languages natively, the variation can't be boxed into "rules" to make it easy to learn, and the end result is that you just end up implicitly memorizing it. It's hard to realize because you basically end up modeling this subconsciously as there being multiple ways to say "five" and multiple ways to say "seventy", so the numbers seem to be following a fixed scheme, but in reality you've learned which synonym to use where. In fact when folks talk about french numbers being weird and complex, this is often the counterexample I give. I suspect this complexity arose from having synonyms for numbers which eventually randomly settled down, and also from having sandhi (rules for melding words together) which got corrupted over time, leading to things like "tay/ees" vs "chau/bees" The website probably should have used the "different form"/"different word" thing it did for English. But note that the site did consider "twelve" to be its own number, not 10 + 2, which is basically what's happening here too, just extended 1-100. |
Same deal with English.
> and after that numbers are named in the reverse order of their digits. E.g. 45 will be five - forty.
Which is similar in complexity to English, just the order of speaking is reversed.
> _except_ the word for five will be different from the word for five in, say, 75. Similarly, the word for "fifty" in the fifties is different for many of them.
Now I realize what you're saying. It seems that I have memorized every number. Because I never thought of this.