I like the elf thing with eleven. So if a Beowulf-era bean counter was adding on his fingers, and got past ten to eleven, the "elf" maybe is like a mnemonic for the reduction by removing the units digit and proceeding into the decades. So "twelf" would make a good mnemonic for the "second elf" (second time you had to remember it's reduced by a decade).
The earlier posts in this thread say that's just about what happened. I suggested that the reason 12 is such an important number that it's not rendered as ten-plus-two is that its many factors make it very useful for business, and probably other domains such as religious rites.
Just a wild ass guess. Latin languages that I know go from ten to (if I had to make up an equivalent) onesy, twosy, thricey, quadsy, quintsy...then they give up and go ahead and say 10+6, 10+7 . . . .
Spanish
once, doce, etc., are merely Latin
undecem, duodecem, etc., the Latin versions of ten-plus-one, ten-plus two, etc. In Latin this series went all the way to nineteen, but the Spaniards gave up after fifteen, presumably because the larger numbers weren't used often enough to remember their Latin forms. Just as we all know that a
Homo sapiens by his Latin name is one of us because we discuss our own species frequently, but few of us recognize our close relative the chimpanzee by his Latin name,
Pan troglodytes.
The numbers beyond fifteen in Spanish are formed the same way: ten-and-six, ten-and-seven, etc., but in
Spanish rather than Latin:
dieciseis, diecisiete,, etc., their own condensed versions of
diez y seis, diez y siete, etc. Spanish grammar is not as highly inflected as Latin, so they have to use a conjunction to do this instead of changing the ending on the numbers.
Interestingly, the various Romance languages did not stop at the same point. In French, sixteen is
seize from Latin, but seventeen is pure French
dix-sept. Catalan goes even further with
setce for seventeen.
Surely you know that 20 is not ten-plus-ten in any Indo-European language. It's usually "two tens," as in English "twenty" from older
twain-tic, but Latin has a special word
viginti, whose origin I haven't been able to trace, which becomes Spanish
veinte, French
vingt, etc.
Not sure how that reasoning might fit with the Germanic etymologies . . . .
The Romans built a civilization (albeit largely by helping themselves to what the Greeks had already built) so their clerks, traders and scribes had use for handy words for large numbers. Heck, they even invented writing (again, largely appropriated from the Greeks). The Germanic tribes, much later immigrants to Europe from their Stone Age origins in the Pontic Steppe, had not quite advanced that far. Roman civilization was imposed on us. So we adopted a few of their number-words like dozen, gross (twelve dozen), million and second, but we kept our native eleven-twelve-thirteen series.
And why chemistry, but char is written as kar!! c, k, ch, ck, qu etc prounce alike.
Chemistry comes to us from Latin, which took it from Greek. The CH represents the Greek letter chi, written X, and is pronounced like Russian KH, German CH or Spanish J. (I believe some or many of the Indic and/or Dravidian languages also have this phoneme, usually transliterated as KH in English spelling.) The Romans could pronounce the CH, but as the Classical era drew to a close they lost it, and by the time we borrowed all of those Latin-Greek words containing CH, it had been simplified to a K sound.
Pitman created a phonetic system for his short hand system. ith and thee are different sounding.
In America we use Gregg shorthand, not Pitman, although I'm not sure anyone uses it at all anymore in the digital age. It deals with the TH digraph the same way: the voiced (or "soft") TH of thou, this, weather and bathe is represented by the same symbol as the voiceless (or "hard") TH of thing, aesthetic, mathematical and truth.
In practice this does not cause confusion. There are very few pairs of words containing TH that are pronounced identically except for a voiced versus voiceless TH. In fact, I walked away from this composition window for ten minutes and tried to think of such a pair, and I could only find one:
loathe (voiced TH, meaning to hate) and
loath or
loth (voiceless TH, meaning reluctant.)
