[Xirdus]

Up to 12? Is that a British/Anglosphere/Victorian thing? In Poland they teach up to 10, which is suffinient for arbitrarily large numbers because they also teach long division and how to combine it with times table. Technically up to 9 would be sufficient but 10 is such a nice round number.

[raldi]

Yeah, every US sixth-grader can instantly tell you 12x12=144 but will have to puzzle out 2x13 the long way.

[gerdesj]

Gross!

[AnotherGoodName]

It is yes. The anglosphere has historically been somewhat base 12 in currency, time and units of measurement.

Currency is now metric but there’s still a few base 12 things in common usage (feet and inches) in the us at least. Nobody’s gone to metric time yet and base 12 transfers smoothly to base 60 too.

[Xirdus]

Of course it's because of imperial units. TIL, thanks. But on a sidenote, I question the utility of knowing x11 and x12 when working with time. x15 could be useful, unfortunate they don't teach that (but I think most people with higher education learn it on their own).

[acheron]

Feet and inches long predate imperial units, and the US has never used the imperial system, btw. “Imperial” has a specific meaning and isn’t just “anything not metric”.

Anyway, base 12 is also built into most Germanic languages which have unique names for 11 and 12 (rather than something along the lines of “one-teen” and “two-teen”, which is more common in Romance languages IIRC.

[debugnik]

Out of the most spoken romance languages, Spanish and Portuguese have distinct names up to 15, French and Italian up to 16, while Romanian does stop at 10. This suggests hexadecimal influence to me.

[zabzonk]

It's definitely a UK thing. And 12 is a nicer round number than 10 - ask the Babylonians!

[sltkr]

What's so nice about twelve-and-two (12)? Twelve (10) is a much nicer round number.

Though programmers may prefer base two (10) or base twelve-and-four (10).

[Xirdus]

If you say it in German, it doesn't even sound out of place. Zweiundzwölf, vierundzwölf.