Most of these languages are, like English, a bit disorderly up to 20. The Indo-European languages - the large family of languages that includes English and its Germanic relatives (e.g., Dutch, Danish, Swedish, German), Latin and its descendants (e.g., Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian), the Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Polish, Czech), Greek, and some of the languages of India - are not, in general, as regular. For example, 58 in both languages is literally “five tens and eight.”
Some languages, like Hebrew and Japanese, name numbers under 100 explicitly as so many tens and so many ones.
Different languages make different choices about that naming, but every language that has names for numbers beyond 20 has evolved a patterned way of naming them so that the names, themselves, support mental computation. That pattern is not in the numbers, but in the way we name (and write) them. But pretty soon, the number names settle down to a pattern. The numbers from zero to twelve have names that feel so arbitrary that they might just as well be called Carole, Charles, Carla, Cyril, and so on. Why? Numbers aren’t born with names people invented names for them, names that help us compute. This natural facility with language is especially helpful in learning to add and subtract 10s.
(See Language PowerPoint and also Early algebra for more.) Language and whole number arithmetic
That language-learning capacity can help them learn mathematics, too, especially when the mathematical idea they are learning depends on the way we name numbers. See also numbers from 1 to 10 in different languages.Children are extraordinary linguists! They acquire half their adult vocabulary and nearly all their adult grammar by the time they are 5 years old, mostly informally and outside of school. The following is a list of names of the numbers from 11 to 20 in several different
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