Spanish numbers.

I kind of love how I vaguely know how higher number are formed in (Spanish), but I don't really know them.

Like twice now when I've been talking to my (Guatemalan) coworkers at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I've had to say the word for "eighty" in (Spanish), and I say something like "ochoranta," only that's not it, and they correct me (I believe to "ochenta," if I remember it, now).

I feel like I'm recapitulating ways that languages were transformed in the past, where people didn't or couldn't study and just haphazardly spoke them as best they could from their intermittent learning environments or their knowledge of their own dialect or related language, and hoped for the best.

Several times now, I've noticed that the pattern of mistake that I discover that I'm making actually corresponds to a way that I've read some language has actually transformed historically.

It's like a deep unity, of present and past.