Why don’t the English words for “eleven” and “twelve” take the form #-teen like the rest of their neighbors?
When Glen Lean was studying counting systems in Indonesia, he formalized a system to categorize the language of numbers, and was able to depict migration patterns during the settling of the islands.
Cyclic Patterns: this language (above chart) has unique words for 1-4, as well as 20. So it is said to have a cycle of 4, and a super-ordinate cycle of 20
Operative Patterns: symbols like + and ×, which are spoken when speaking the name of the number. An analog in English would be to say the number 9 is to say “4 times 2 plus 1”
Number Morphs are the numerals which have distinct words (1, 2, 3, 4, 20). This sequence of number morphs is called the Frame Pattern.
developed by Z. Salzmann and Glen Lean
afterthought- often in Indian-European base-10 systems’ number morphs are separated from each other exponentially, all number morphs after 10 occur at 10ⁿ. It’s sufficient to just describe it by its Number Base.
(Source: uog.ac.pg)
