Lord Noel on Ye Languyage Anglaise

What ho! Pepys...

I have always said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and this has been borne out by my recently received (two) emails from people saying something along the lines of "We have viewed your so-called 'Blog' and read the varied content displayed there and have found ourselves wanting! There seems to be no discernibly 'content' on the page with which we can engage the hungry grey matter within our skulls"
So - to satisfy those 'knowledge hungry' personages I have purloined the following missal which will both educate and stimulate your cranium contents to a point where I think you will fall back onto the sofa of life afterwards...
...feeling totally satiated...
It all revolves around our counting system and the fact that we recently had a 11/11/11 date which seems like an over abundance of 'eleventies' regardless of which western society you emanate from.
Eleven seems strange to some as it deviates from the 'ten plus' system we are used to.
All the other numbers (excluding zero to ten) seem to follow a formulaic pattern, these two -- at first blush, at least -- are outliers.  In short, "11" is not "one teen" and for that matter, "12" is not "two teen." What is going on here?
While you may think that the words emerged from a base-12 numbering system -- think months of the year, hours in half a day, or inches in a foot -- it turns out that this simply isn't the case.  "Eleven" is actually a base-10 term.  
The word "eleven" is derived from the Old English word "endleofan" (pronounced "end-lih-fen") which itself comes from the Germanic "ainlif," a compound word: "ain" means "one" and "lif" was a version of the word "left."  (The word "leave" has the same root.)  Combined, "ainlif" means "one left." Imagine a Germanic goat herder from the early Middle Ages counting his flock, putting them in units of ten -- but missing his estimate and ending up with one left over.  That last one is "ainlif" -- "eleven."
The word "twelve" follows a similar construct, from the terms "twelf" in Old English and "twalif" at its Germanic routs.  Again, the word "ten" is assumed and the math still works: "eleven" is really "ten plus one" and "twelve" is "ten plus two."  There is nothing duodenary about their names.
For 13 to 19? "Teen" simply means "ten more than," and of course, the prefix is self-explanatory.  And no, we do not know why there is a linguistic split after twelve. Both the "teen" and "lif" terms developed at roughly the same time -- probably around the year 900. The antiquity of these terms makes it impossible to determine the reason for certain. 

So now you know!


Tallyho!
Best Wishes - Lord Noel