Eleven and Twelve

What is it about these 2 numbers? Why are they not teens?

As in 12 should be twoteen and 11 oneteen.

Another example is the german: Zwolf, elf; Zweizehn, einzehn

I believe this is true for most indo-european languages (apart from italian strangely).

I suspected they would be remnants of a duodecimal counting system, but apparently not. Here's a quote from Wikipedia for you:

Germanic languages have special words for 11 and 12, such as eleven and twelve in English, which are often misinterpreted as vestiges of a duodecimal system. However, they are considered to come from Proto-Germanic *ainlif and *twalif (respectively one left and two left), both of which were decimal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Origin

It doesn't explain French's onze and douze, etc. though.

>>2
So why is it like that in the Proto-Germanic ?

that, my dear op, is because italian is an amazing language.

>>4
no its not it only has 24 letters

>>2
I'm about to blow your mind. Ready?

French is from Old Frankish. The Franks were Germans from the Rhineland. French has a very small core of Germanic words on top of really shitty Latin.

>>2
>>6
They're contractions from the Latin ūndecim (ūnus 'one' + decim 'ten') and duodecim (duo 'two' + decim 'ten').  Just as they are in all Romance languages, aside from Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian, where they are not contracted.

And French is from Vulgar Latin.  Old Frankish was a substratum, but not where the language came from.  Further, eleven and twelve in French didn't come from Germanic roots, they came from Italic roots.

>>7
Yes, but you failed to consider that your mother was a whore.

What about threeteen?

>>9
or thirtytwelve