Der 911 ist kühl.

It's hard for me to look at numerals and not seem them as things named in English even though they may be stuck in the context of a sentence from some other language. I don't know if someone from Germany who speaks English at roughly my level of German might ask me "Who will the San Francisco Neunundvierzigers take with their first pick the NFL draft?" but I really want to call all numbers by their English names. Maybe it's just that when I'm reading I don't have to recall that 1917 in the context of a Russian sentence is not "nineteen seventeen," but тысяча девятьсот семнадцатый when used with the year. (Yes, I had to look that up, and it is actually the ordinal 1917th.)

But it just occured to me that the car the Porsche 911 might be seen to be much less desirable in the English speaking world if it was marketed as the Porsche Neunhundertelf. Yes, the German for eleven is elf. I'm not totally sure how they actually say this in German, but I think they would just say their version of "nine-eleven," or "neun-elf." (Remember they pronounce -eu- like our -oi-) As for its gender, I'm not totally sure why, but the de.wikipedia calls it Der 911er, or "der neun-elfer," which is slightly more appealing to my English ears. Although I suppose it would decline to -elfen and -elfem, which aren't that great either.