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by masklinn 1290 days ago
For the wiki on the counting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera

You can see jiggit in most of them (I assume that's the ancestral form and most ancestral ones, as the others differ quite a bit more from one another).

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It's cognate with 'deich/déag' in Irish and 'deg' in Welsh, both of which mean 'ten', which is an interesting artifact, and likely down to 'dau ddeg' being one of the ways in Welsh of saying 'twenty', but that's a relatively recent change from influence from English and other languages, as the various Celtic languages are traditionally base-20. You can see some echoes of this in French to this day, as it inherited its manner of counting from Gaulish.