Ramblings of a hopped up mind

Too much coffee during dinner coupled with 34C nighttime temperature = Restlessness.

So while I was lying there for hours staring up at the ceiling with unblinking eyes, my caffeine-charged mind started obsessing over the most bizarre things. It's funny how ideas that seemed so thought-consuming last night turned out to be so incredibly trivial in the morning.

Submitted for your approval, ideas to mull over the next time you're stuck in traffic, lying awake or just plain bored out of your skull:

Why is it that the numbers 1 to 10 are all monosyllabic except for "Seven"? Why not something short, like "Sev"?

What is so special about the number 12 that we need a unique naming system for the first 12 numbers? For example, all the 20's follow the same naming: twenty-one, twenty-two….twenty-nine. But for the 10's, we only start the "teen" naming convention with 13. There's "eleven" and "twelve" instead of "one-teen" and "two-teen". Why are humans so obsessed with the number 12 (e.g. twelve months) that it needs all 12 numbers to be unique?

Why is it "Thirteen"? That implies the "3rd teen", but in fact it's the first teen (Eleven and Twelve aren't considered teens). And why is it 'Thirteen" and "Fifteen" instead of "Threeteen" and "Fiveteen"? All the other teens are simply the integer + teen.

And while were on it, why "teen" at all? Look at all the later numbers: 20, 21 = twenty and twenty-one, 60, 61 = sixty and sixty-one. So why not "ten-one, ten-two…ten-nine, twenty"?

Here's a non-numerical quandary: what's the purpose of the letter "Q"? There's nothing "Q" spells that can't be spelled with "K" or "KW" (example: Irak, Kwestion"). If "Q" could act alone and make the "kw" sound then it could be considered an efficient character because you could use 4 letters to spell "qick" instead of 5 using "kwick". But the fact remains that "Q" invariable needs to be followed by a "U" for all "kw" sounds, so there's absolutely no difference between 5-letter "quick" and "kwick".

Speaking of efficiency, why do we use "Ge" in words that can be spelled simply with a "J"? Example: "George" -> "Jorj".

And the Grand Unification of all my thoughts: If you insist on keeping "Ge", then get rid of "J". Then, we can get rid of "Q" as well and have 24 letters in our alphabet, which is a multiple of the wonderful number Twelve. Ooooooo….