Re: Why are "the teens" special ?

> Can anyone discuss the reversed-number names for the teens (or at
> least some of the teen numbers) in Indo-European languages? Did the
> teens have any special significance in the past? Or is it simply
> something like more common words being the most "irregular", with
> numbers that were used less often following a more regular pattern?
> Did the concept of "tens' place", etc, come much LATER, after the
> lower numbers had been named?

Those numbers are no exception in Dutch, German, Danish (and
optionally in Norwegian), where ones always precede tens (eg.
eenentwintig, einundzwanzig, enogtyve).

Torsten