Tuesday, 31 December 2013

Onety

Onety: numberal. Onety is an alternative way of saying "ten," only it is far more intuitive for foreigners than learning a completely new word for the same digit with a zero added to it. We can find the first occurrence of the word onety in one of Lewis Carroll´s unpublished manuscripts about the logic-lacking English language:
"Reading an unspecified book, it came to me while reading it that as I read it, my eyes could not be contained because my thoughts were being carried away towards the nature of numbers. I am of the opinion that onety should be a valid alternative for saying "ten," as it would follow the trend of the following tens after it. In fact, now that I come to think of it, I am of the opinion that as well as onety, we should have the word twoty, threety, fourty, fivety and eightty (as sixty, seventy and ninety are already the prevailing ways of saying these digits)."
Well... one can see why Carroll never got around to publishing this manuscript. Nonetheless, this does not decrease the validity of his argument based on profound logic and reason.

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