inventrix: (Default)
inventrix ([personal profile] inventrix) wrote in [community profile] noviceconlangers 2011-12-06 06:14 pm (UTC)

Like Clare said, it's difficult to differentiate if they rhyme. Base numbers are usually very different-sounding from each other.

Some examples:
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten
uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez
ichi ni san shi(or yon) go roku shichi(or nana) hachi kyuu juu

The only ones that really sound a bit similar to other numbers are in Japanese and are the two that have separate, entirely dissimilar variants.

As for alphabetical order, one of the early Indo-European languages settled on what I believe to be a fairly arbitrary order and we've all just been copying it ever since. The existence of an alphabetical order really only happened once literacy first became fairly common in a language group's culture, I think.

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