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In Old English, a language descended from Germanic dialects, numerals where "backwards", too: fēowertīene "four-teen", ān and twentiġ "one and twenty" etc., and you can still find remnants of an old vigesimal (base 20) counting system, e.g. (Please note that "hundred" once meant 120.) I don't claim to understand the logic behind "einundzwanzig", but the question might be to understand the thinking behind numerals and find out about historic counting systems, not about reading direction. "364 days" in Old Norse is fiora dagar ens fiortha hundraths "four days into the fourth hundred (= 120)". Similar to this Finnish logic, Old Norse used a counting system not based on tens, but on dozens and multiples of the divisors of twelve (e.g. Again, there is no reading direction implied in the number name. The logic seems to be to view the decades and then say how far into which decade we are. In Finnish, eighteen is called kah-deksan-toista "two (from) ten (in the) second (ten)". In Breton, the number eighteen has the name tri-ouch "three (times) six" – I cannot discern any direction in this numeral. Many numerals existing today were created long before reading was practised, so if there is any direction in a language at all, German does not "read" "backwards", it speaks "backwards".īut then, very likely numerals are not named with regard to direction at all, but for the logic behind counting. Spoken language was in existence before written language. The question, why German numbers are "backwards" is naive in many ways.