"four-and-twenty, Twenty-four". What's in a Number?

This paper investigates "what's in a number", i.e. how natural numbers are pronounced in several European languages. As regards reading numbers above 20, 29 languages read the decade first and then the digit, e.g. twenty-four, and 10 languages read the digit before the decade, e.g. four-and-twenty. Two languages, Norwegian and Czech, use both systems, and 9 languages use (partly) a vigesimal system. An analysis of the Norwegian part of the European SpeechDat database showed that reading the decade first is used more in formal than in non-formal (spontaneous) speech and that typographic layout of digits influenced the reading of them.