In English, the name of each integer shares a letter with EACH of its neighbors. ONE shares an O with TWO, TWO shares a T with THREE … and so on to infinity.
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
.......teens
Twenty-...
Thirty-... etc. etc.
zero
ReplyDeleteone
This is actually not that surprising. The real coincidence occurs only in the first twenty numbers (because all numbers after twenty repeat the earlier numbers), so carrying it on to infinity isn't really relevant. Most of the first twenty numbers have several letters each, many of which are commonly used in English (e, n, s, t), so sharing of letters between adjacent numbers is really only a small coincidence.
ReplyDeleteIf it's not surprising, as you suggest, then it should also occur in other languages. Does it?
ReplyDelete(not in German: funf...sechs)
(or French: deux...trois)
(or Norwegian: en...to)
From one to twenty, German has two that don't match on either side (funf and acht); French has one that doesn't match on one side (deux-trois) and one that doesn't match on either (dix). All the others have matches on both sides.
ReplyDeleteThat English doesn't have any that don't have a match on both sides doesn't seem like a huge deal. If in other languages there were many fewer matches, maybe it would begin to look odd. (Of course, our sample is only four languages out of, what, thousands.)
it's still cool. All coincidences are.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite common, in the course of language change, for adjacent numbers to be changed so that they begin with the same sound (often in ways that violate the general laws of sound change for the language in question). This happened in proto-Germanic for the words for 'four' and 'five', which is why those numbers start with the same letter in English (compare Greek tessares, pente, Sanskrit catvarah, panca), and in Balto-Slavic for the words for 'nine' and 'ten' (Russian d'ev'at', d'es'at' (instead of *n'ev'at', d'es'at', which is what you'd expect)), and in the Algonquian language Maliseet-Passamaquoddy for the words for 'three' and 'four' (nihi, new; these would otherwise have been nihi, *yew).
ReplyDeleteI assume this is because numbers are often recited in sequence, which probably makes it particularly easy for them to affect each other. Anyway, I can see how this tendency could make the phenomenon noted in the original post more likely; if Proto-Germanic hadn't mashed 'four' and 'five' together, the English word for 'four' would probably be 'whour'.