Re:Why are German numbers backwards?
by rahimnathwani on Sunday November 28, 2021 @12:04PM
(#29370552)
When I say eight-ten in Chinese, my mind is thinking of the singular concept '80', not 8 tens.
The same as when I say eight-y in English.
It's similar but I don't think it qualifies as the same since we do not say "four tens". Forty is a concept in itself, just like suffix -s for plural is a separate concept from singular. Suffixes and prefixes are modifiers. We don't ordinarily say, for example, "many apple", we say "apples".