English uses "dozens" in more situations than Dutch uses "tens", also because "tens" in Dutch is a three-syllable word. It's often just not idiomatic
I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.
It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff
I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.
It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff