Esperanto · Chapter 5 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Numbers and counting
Dek du is twelve, dudek is twenty, and nothing is irregular. Numbers, ordinals with -a, fractions with -ono, and the du hundred ways English numbers refuse to be this simple.
The short version
Multiply and you join up, add and you space out
Nine roots plus dek, cent and mil give you every number in Esperanto, and two rules assemble them. Multiplication is written solid: dudek is two tens, ducent is two hundreds. Addition stays apart: dek du is ten plus two. So dudek du is 22 and cent dudek tri is 123. There is no thirteen-versus-three irregularity waiting for you, because nothing here is irregular.
dudek du, cent dudek tri
Cardinals never take -j or -n
In mi vidas tri homojn the noun picks up both endings and tri stays untouched. Speakers of Slavic and Romance languages expect the number to react, and it does not. The only numbers that decline are the ones that have stopped being numbers: ordinals are adjectives, la unuajn tagojn, and forms like duono and dekduo are nouns. Four suffixes build those out of a cardinal: -a, -on-, -obl- and -op-.
Mi vidas tri homojn.
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