Teen years come later if you are Spanish

I am working through a Spanish language book with accompanying audio track. It is slow going and I should have started months before I came on this trip to Barcelona. Of course, Catalan is the local language and I know a (very) few words in that language. I was told and it seems to be true that if you are clearly a foreigner to Spain, Catalans are fine to speak Spanish with you. This is good since Spanish is so much more widely spoken, and is quite useful back in North America.

I learned the numbers up to 20 in Spanish this week, and was surprised to find that the "teen" numbers begin at 16. There is quinze (15) and then deiciseis (16). My Catalan colleague says that in Catalan, they start at 17. The expression they have for teens by our counting is adolescent. Makes sense.

I thought this was an interesting difference and it also made me a bit critical of my own language. We could only get 12 different whole numbers before we had to recycle them. You could be generous and say that we have a baker's dozen, since "thirteen" is not "threeteen".