[HN Gopher] Why are German numbers backwards?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are German numbers backwards?
Author : tosh
Score : 225 points
Date : 2021-11-28 09:55 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (german.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (german.stackexchange.com)
| alkonaut wrote:
| The answer goes through great lengths explaining why it's just
| historical and everyone did it so it's _not_ backwards. That
| sounds backwards to me.
| t8e56vd4ih wrote:
| confuses me a lot. I'm German but tend to speak numbers in
| English in my mind when writing them down.
|
| also impressive is the number of cases:
|
| eins eine einer ein einem einen eines
|
| probably forgot a few
| Pxtl wrote:
| Now I'm curious, are there any cultures on earth that are fully
| little-endian? I know RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic put
| the least-sig-digit on the right and are therefore read as
| little-endian, but afaik when they read them aloud they follow
| the Germanic approach of "Three hundreds and four and twenty",
| not starting from the least-sig-digit.
|
| Also, Unicode does this crazy thing where it switches typing
| direction to LTR when you start Latin numerals even if you're in
| an RTL language, I think. I worked on an i18n project and the
| behavior of Unicode with RTL languages confused the hell out of
| me.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| Byblical Hebrew has numbers in "two and twenty" format
| (including things like "fifty and hundred"), but in modern
| Hebrew they are pronounced similarly to English, including
| special exceptions for 11-19 and using Million->Billion
| (Milliard allowed as well)->Trillion rather than
| Million->Milliard->Billion->Billiard; And not including the
| "thirty five hundred" oddity, in Hebrew that's "Three thousands
| five hundred".
| mro_name wrote:
| Arabic/indian numbers, when written in arab writing direction
| from right (lowest significant decimal) to left (most
| significant) can just be read logically without scanning ahead
| but in order small to big.
|
| Maybe german borrowed this RTL reading order for the 2-digit
| numbers.
|
| German borrowed the word 'Ziffer' (= 'digit') from the arab word
| for 'zero', so there's some connections.
| otagekki wrote:
| Be happy it's only backwards from 10 to 99.
|
| Have you checked Malagasy? We read the numbers totally backwards
| although we've switched to the Latin alphabet like 200 years
| ago... It's sometimes so inconvenient for everyday life,
| especially for large amounts, that we end up counting in _French_
| instead. For numbers 11 to 99, we also use casual abbreviations
| like (I translated) "one with two" for 21; or "seven with three"
| for 37, but reading large numbers from 10,000 upwards (mostly
| Malagasy currency) with the left-to-right writing system is
| tedious.
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| Yan tyan tethera methera pimp... dick... bumfit... giggot.
|
| Which is to say, who are we to judge German numbers when there
| are weirder ones:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbric#Counting_systems
| jlg23 wrote:
| As a German who nowadays speaks French most of the time, I long
| for my simple German numbers...
|
| 99 in French is quatre-vingt-dix-huit (four-twenty ten-eight)
| MikeCapone wrote:
| Not that it matters too much, but what you speller out is 98,
| not 99
| arendtio wrote:
| Given that in English, as well as in German, contrary to the
| roman letters, the numbers are arabic signs, I wonder in which
| direction arabs spell their numbers.
|
| Does anybody know?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If you think about it, arabic numerals are a right-to-left
| script.
|
| 2,021: one and twenty and two thousand.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| It's confusing.
|
| For everyday usage we use a mix of the two; thus, 1998 is read
| as "a thousand and nine hundred and eight and ninety". So:
|
| 1998 >><<
|
| But according to the traditional way (you hear it used in the
| news for example), it's read as "eight and ninety and nine
| hundred and a thousand". So:
|
| 1998 <<<<
|
| However, this is so rare that many of the younger native Arabic
| speakers aren't even aware of it.
| arendtio wrote:
| Isn't arabic in general written and read from right-to-left?
| That way the traditional way seems very consistent.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| So in written Arabic, the digits go from least significant to
| most significant which means a number looks the same when
| written least-significant first right-to-left as it does in
| e.g. written English, most-significant first left-to-right.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| While I don't know for sure, some blame the new (mixed) way
| of reading numbers on the proliferation of colonial
| languages (English and French); i.e. people trying to mimic
| how the numbers are in these languages, but only doing it
| half way through.
|
| The problem though is that this mixed way is used across
| the region, so it developing independently each time seems
| a bit way too improbable to be a solid cause.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Another confusing scenario to me is that Arabs who invented the
| numbering system write the digits left-to-right in a right-to-
| left writing system:
|
| rqm htf wldty hw 8765309
|
| It won't let me paste vertical Japanese text or I would
| demonstrate that monstrosity too.
| febstar wrote:
| Most likely because Arabs did not invent the numbering system:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370553
| egeozcan wrote:
| Yeah let's not do original research in HN. This can have
| millions of reasons.
| geraneum wrote:
| Interestingly, I have a German girlfriend who, when speaks
| English, sometimes reads numbers backwards mistakenly. For
| example, she reads 73, thirty-seven before quickly fixing it.
| [deleted]
| lr1970 wrote:
| It is worse than "backwards". It is mostly forwards except for
| the special case of the second digit that is transposed with the
| first digit. For example, 123 becomes "one-hundred-three-and-
| twenty". It was driving me nuts for ages.
| willyt wrote:
| "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in pie" is a line from English
| nursery rhyme. Also two score and ten meaning 50 is not that old.
| At some point fairly recently English must have changed to the
| current system. Until the 1960's there were 12 pence in a
| shilling and 20 shillings in a British pound sterling (240
| pence).
| kevinwang wrote:
| Yeah, I'm reading Pride and Prejudice right now (1813) and in
| dialogue they speak numbers "backwards" like that.
| timthorn wrote:
| My grandmother would often use that form of words in regular
| speech.
| optimusprinceps wrote:
| This is not unique to German. In Urdu, numbers higher than 20 are
| pronounced: 1-2 for 21 (aik-ees), 5-4 for 45 etc.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| I am sure it has been said, but it is not any more backwards than
| "thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,
| nineteen" -> three and ten, four and ten, five and ten...
|
| In fact, in German it keeps being consistent, while in English
| and other languages you change the direction after 20... quite
| arbitrarily...
|
| When you speak German they as backwards to you, as thirteen is to
| you when you speak English... Not backwards at all...
| Ekaros wrote:
| And then there is eleven and twelve... Like not even
| consistency inside one decade... We in Finland have decency two
| say "one-second ... nine-second"
| vnorilo wrote:
| Yes, we say "yksitoista" (one of second), "kaksitoista (two
| of second) and so on until twenty, where we revert to
| "kaksikymmentayksi" (two tens and one; ten in actual plural).
| But in some old books from the early 20th century, the
| reversal goes on beyond 20: "kaksikolmatta" (two of third)
| for 22 and so on. I do not know how that archaic usage deals
| with 100+.
| globular-toast wrote:
| It's quite important for programmers especially to decouple the
| idea of numbers from the notation and representation of numbers.
| Start with Knuth, chapter four. There is only one integer that we
| call "one", but there are infinitely many names for it: "un",
| "ein" etc. You could even make up your own name if you like.
| There is no right or wrong way to say or write numbers, there are
| just more or less convenient ways, depending on the application.
|
| When it comes to natural language, the answer to "why is X the
| way it is?" is always ultimately the same: because it works. It
| is sometimes interesting to learn that this word came from that
| root and so on, but ultimately we're just making sounds with our
| throats and mouths that go into other people's ears. Everyone
| around the world is talking about the same stuff, there are just
| so many ways to say it we often settled on different ones.
| xaedes wrote:
| I often see a similar problem in code that deals with coordinate
| system transformations. But there is a simple solution! It boils
| down to properly naming your variables.
|
| When using transformation matrices to transform from one
| coordinate system "In" into another coordinate system "Out" you
| have two options to name the matrix: M_{In,Out} or M_{Out,In},
| which can be read as "In to Out" and "Out from In". Unfortunately
| what I often see is the first notation. It looks simpler at
| first, but it is actually backwards, similar to how the german
| numbers are backwards.
|
| When you chain the transformations you get this weird forth and
| back:
|
| M_{A to C} = M_{B to C} * M_{A to B}
|
| M_{A,C} = M_{B,C} * M_{A,B}
|
| Compare that to the (not backward) alternative:
|
| M_{C from A} = M_{C from B} * M_{B from A}
|
| M_{C,A} = M_{C,B} * M_{B,A}
|
| Note how the Bs line up, C is the most left in both sides of the
| equation and A is on the right. When you transform a vector from
| coordinate system A to, lets say C, it looks like this: "vec_C =
| M_{C,A} * vec_A". Everything lines up and is in the natural order
| the transformations are taking place in. Compared to this, the
| backward notation is really confusing.
|
| I see people make mistakes when dealing with transformation
| chains all the time because they use this weird M_{From,To}
| notation, or worse, no notation involving the coordinate systems
| at all.
|
| Like take this example: "M = M1 * inv(M3) * M2", what does that
| even mean. Find names for the involved coordinate systems and
| name the transformations accordingly. That could be: M1
| transforms to A from B, M3 is C_B, M2 is C_D. Then M is A_D:
|
| B_C = inv(C_B)
|
| A_D = A_B * B_C * C_D
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I was a bit unsatisfied by the top answer which mostly seemed to
| be a reaction to the connotations of the word 'backwards' rather
| than a discussion of the history which was tacked on at the end.
|
| I _think_ the answer is that languages didn't traditionally have
| base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things
| based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting,
| and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and
| measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals
| arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted
| more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and
| English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers
| above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think,
| 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think).
| So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so
| similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1]
| question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new
| arithmetic system and people don't really notice the vestiges of
| the old systems much.
|
| [1] I don't want to say that the question is bad but rather that
| without the historical context it seems like a question more
| specific to German than something like "why do adjectives come
| before the noun in English and after it in French" which ends up
| with an answer that is roughly general history plus "that's just
| how it happened".
| DFHippie wrote:
| I personally liked the reply further down the stack that said
| the German order is more useful in context of counting. You put
| the digit that changes with every count first and the one that
| stays the same for a while second (or mention it only when it
| changes). Because you don't typical count methodically like
| this if the number of things counted is large, this system only
| obtains for two-digit numbers. This is just a hypothesis, but I
| thought it was the most interesting answer.
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| I do the same thing in English, especially when counting to
| estimate time. I'm not thinking "twenty, twenty-one, twenty-
| two" I'm thinking "twenty, -one, -two'.
|
| I think I prefer English's ordering for that. When I say
| "twenty, -one," it sounds like twenty-one, but as it's the
| twenty-first item that's not terribly confusing. Were it
| "neun-, zwanzig" it sounds a bit more like "neunundzwanzig."
|
| I suppose that problem just moves to English if you're
| counting down, though. _shrug_
| juped wrote:
| All the top answers are similarly awful, just smug bleating and
| ignoring the question. If someone doesn't know the etymological
| history, they shouldn't say anything!
| ilaksh wrote:
| It wouldn't be a Stack Exchange site if the question and asker
| were not insulted.
| IshKebab wrote:
| "Closed as too stupid, you bloody idiot."
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Actually, this is a modern thing. In the old German language
| (pre-1800) the numbers were spelled in the correct order in the
| areas where Hochdeutsch was spoken, with the single digit being
| at the end.
|
| Also some early books from the era directly after the 30 jaehrige
| Krieg still use the different way of spelling numbers (e.g. from
| Eva Hartner comes to mind).
|
| Einhundert-Zwanzig-und-Eins is still a number everybody
| understands, and it is also accepted in written form on bank
| transfer checks.
|
| So I'd say just go ahead and use it this way :) the more people
| use this way of spelling numbers, the more likely it is that the
| language will adapt and change (back).
| dctaflin wrote:
| Fascinating. I studied Finnish for three years and it never
| occurred to me that the numbers 8 and 9 (kahdeksan and yhdeksan)
| mean 2-from-10 and 1-from-10. Though 10 isn't "deksan", it's
| "kymmenen". Still the "yh" and "kah" should have been clearly
| seen as akin to "yksi" and "kaksi" (one and two).
| submeta wrote:
| Turkish seems to be the most systematic than:
|
| 11 => On Bir (Ten One)
|
| 12 => On iki (Ten two)
|
| ...
|
| 21 => Yirmi bir (Twenty One)
|
| Etc
| abdusco wrote:
| Yet, the names of tens don't seem to follow any logic:
|
| 10: on (no connection to 1: bir)
|
| 20: yirmi (no connection to 2: iki)
|
| 30: otuz (no connection to 3: uc)
|
| 40: kirk (no connection to 4: dort)
|
| 50: elli (no connection to 5: bes)
|
| 60: altmis (sounds like 6: alti)
|
| 70: yetmis (sounds like 7: yedi)
|
| 80: seksen (sounds like 8: sekiz)
|
| 90: doksan (sounds like 9: dokuz)
|
| To this day, I can't figure out how "yedi" becomes "yetmis", or
| whether they're related at all. Are they borrowed from Farsi?
| egeozcan wrote:
| It comes from Chuvash language. Ins forms counting numbers,
| and language researches think they used to count in tens, as
| they didn't need precise numbers.
|
| yedi/seven (m) ins -> yetimins -> yetmis/seventy
|
| alti/six (m) ins -> altimins -> altmis/sixty. see:
| https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=altm%C4%B1%C5%9F (in
| Turkish)
|
| 90 is tokuz-on (dokuz-on, nine-ten), 80 is formed that way
| too.
|
| 40, 30, 20 have specific names in old Turkish. Which means
| they used those numbers a lot, but no evidence why. No
| connection to 4, 3, 2 whatsoever (old Turkish for 4 ist tort,
| for example).
|
| 50 (elli) comes from the same root as the word which means
| hand (el). You can perhaps guess why.
|
| Long story short: You just need to memorize them if you are
| speaking Modern Turkish because "historical reasons". Turks
| started using numbers a bit too early and early weirdness was
| never fully "corrected" :)
|
| What I like in Turkish is that you don't use the unnecessary
| "one" before hundred/thousand. 100 -> yuz, 200 -> iki yuz.
| you don't say "bir yuz" for 100, just "yuz".
| rvense wrote:
| No, Persian has words that are vaguely derived from the basic
| numerals.
| obiwan14 wrote:
| The Yoruba system is very sane and logical. For example, the
| Yoruba word for:
|
| 10: mewa 20: ogun 30: ogbon 40: ogoji, which is a contraction of
| "ogun meji", or 20 twice. Meji is the word for 2. 100: Ogorun -
| ogun marun, or 20 in 5, or 20 times 5.
|
| The fun part is in the numbers in between those. But to
| understand them you have to learn how to count to 10, so here
| goes:
|
| 1: Okan 2: Meji 3: Meta 4: Merin 5: Marun 6: Mefa 7: Meje 8: Mejo
| 9: Meson 10: Mewa
|
| So:
|
| 11: mokanla - 1 more than 10 12: Mejila - 2 more than 10 13:
| Metala - 3 more than 10
|
| You get this point. It goes on like that until it gets to 16,
| when the reference number becomes 20, so:
|
| 16: 4 less than 20 17: 3 less than 20
|
| Until you get to 20. Past 20, then you start in a manner as with
| past 10.
|
| So one can say that there's really no direction in pronunciation
| of numbers in the Yoruba language. Just a very sane and logical
| system. is
| globalise83 wrote:
| I find that in German you often have to wait for the end of a
| complete sentence, often including a couple of subordinate
| clauses, to have a clue what is going on. Let's just say that
| backwards numbers are the least of my problems living in Bavaria.
| Someone wrote:
| The German word for that is _Bandwurmsatz_ ("tapeworm
| sentence", because it goes on and on and on). Native speakers
| likely have a higher threshold for calling a sentence that than
| foreigners.
| masteruvpuppetz wrote:
| Arabic same as German. Urdu takes gold. Every number from 1 to
| 100 has a different name
| pritambaral wrote:
| > Urdu takes gold. Every number from 1 to 100 has a different
| name
|
| Urdu/Hindi numbers (20-99) are mostly small-digit-big-digit
| combos, with special combination rules. One doesn't really have
| to remember eighty different numbers because of the rules.
| Plus, the distinction between how single-digit numerals are
| pronounced and how these combined digits are pronounced helps
| avoid confusion regarding order of the digits.
| masteruvpuppetz wrote:
| Well I somewhat disagree. The big number small number
| combination is not trivial to remember. Sometimes many of
| them don't even have any relation to previous numbers. Even
| to this day 40yrs on, I have to think hard before uttering
| any number. Eg: try remembering Unasi (79) and navasi (89),
| sarsath (67), etc.
| masswerk wrote:
| Here's a guess: It could be because of an emphasis on counting.
| Meaning, when counting, the significant, changing part of the
| numbers is the least significant figure, while the higher
| portions (potencies of the numeric system) become soon redundant.
| There seem to be a cultural differences in languages regarding
| the range in which this seems to matter: while it's just the tens
| in English, this is the entire range up to 100 in German.
| However, even in German this counting range ends at 100 at which
| point we're probably dealing with numbers that had been
| accumulated previously.
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| Me as a foreign mother tongue find it really annoying, so I count
| in my head in my mother language.
|
| There also has been a study, no matter if forward or backwards..
| the first language you learned to count will be the language you
| use for counting in your head for the rest of your counting life
|
| Isn't that cool? Never noticed, now Always pay attention to :)
| gus_massa wrote:
| I also do most math in my native language, Spanish. When I'm
| silent reading text in English, most of the times I "say" the
| numbers in Spanish, but now always. Anyway, I have more
| intuition about numbers in Spanish, so even if I read it in
| English I may translate a few milliseconds later if I must
| think about it.
|
| I can do some elementary calculations in English, like 2+3=5.
| But for more complicated stuff like the second derivative of
| x^3 I must switch to Spanish and translate the result.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'm split about 50/50 with German (native and residence) and
| English counting. But when I count in German and write numbers,
| I tend to make more mistakes because of them being "backwards"
| :(
| ineedasername wrote:
| Big-endian vs. little endian.
|
| In general, languages differ in syntactic structure on the level
| of word order. For example, in Latin, word order a bit free form,
| things could be moved around quite a bit and still make sense to
| the listener. Probably allowed for some interesting creativity
| and poetics.
|
| In English, I would say about a book, "the book on the table". In
| another language, it may be "the on-the-table book."
|
| There's even a slight semantic difference where the later example
| somewhat directly gives the book the property of being "on-the-
| table". IIRC from my school days, that example resembles Japanese
| construction, but please someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's
| been a long time since my comp ling course work.
| umanwizard wrote:
| German numbers are actually mixed-endian when they get to three
| digits and above. "136" is "one-hundred six-and-thirty".
| davidkunz wrote:
| Well, it's not really backwards, that would be too easy. Example:
|
| 3 482 975 is "dreimillionenvierhundertzweiundachzigtausendneunhun
| dertfunfundsiebzig"
|
| which is in pseudo English:
|
| "three million four hundred two and eighty thousand nine hundred
| five and seventy"
|
| Also beware of (German -> English):
|
| Million -> million
|
| Milliarde -> billion
|
| Billion -> trillion
|
| Billiarde -> quadrillion
|
| etc.
| rapnie wrote:
| > Milliarde -> billion
|
| Yeah, and you also see e.g. news anchors making mistakes in
| translation saying things like (Dutch) "Ze investeerden een
| biljoen". Turning a billion into a trillion.
|
| And I also heard that Biden wants to pump a "triljoen" in the
| economy (quintillion)
| qw wrote:
| Norway used to have the same system, but the government
| introduced a reform in the 50s to simplify. Many still use the
| "old" way.
|
| The "correct" modern way is the same as in English.
| kijin wrote:
| Oh, the joys of middle-endian notation.
|
| But who are we to laugh at them, the American date notation
| (M-D-Y) is just as weird.
| blago wrote:
| I recently realized that M-D-Y makes a lot more sense than we
| give it credit for. Date formats needn't be about the
| cardinality of the units, in this case it's about spoken
| language. The M-D-Y format simply follows the order of the
| words in (EDIT: American) English. We say January 4th, 1970.
| Try reading D-M-Y in (EDIT: American) English and you will
| quickly realize that it doesn't make sense. I suspect most
| other spoken languages use 4th January, 1970 so D-M-Y feels
| more natural to them.
|
| EDIT: I'm sorry if I offended you by equating American
| English with English. Point taken. I misspoke. The point
| remains.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| It is true that this is common in American English. This
| goes somewhat to explain why patriotic Americans get
| together every year to celebrate the most American of
| holidays, "July Fourth" :)
| [deleted]
| jrockway wrote:
| I always like the visual look of D-M-Y in writing; a word
| bounded by two numbers (1 January 1970).
|
| If it's going to be all numbers, 1970-01-01 seems like the
| right way to do it. (RFC3339 is the best time format.)
| snthueoa wrote:
| Yes, in England we'd typically say "(the) 4th of January,
| 1970", in line with D-M-Y. I have no idea if the
| correlation is causation, or which caused the other.
| zebracanevra wrote:
| Sorry, but English speaking countries that use DMY simply
| say "4th of January", and it in no way doesn't make sense.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I would say "[the] 4th of January 1970" in English. I think
| saying "January 4th" is an Americanism. It feels to me that
| in some sense 4th is acting as an adjective coming after
| the noun it modifies, which is unusual in English.
| lebuffon wrote:
| Interesting that Americans commonly say "The fourth of
| July". Is that a carry over from 1700's American
| parlance?
| stevesimmons wrote:
| > We say January 4th, 1970. Try reading D-M-Y in English
| and you will quickly realize that it doesn't make sense.
|
| Beware your unconscious ethnocentricity! Presumably you are
| American. I am English. English is the language I use.
|
| The D-M-Y format simply follows the order of the words in
| English. "We" say 4th of January, 1970. Try reading D-M-Y
| in English and you will quickly realise that it does make
| perfect sense... D-M-Y feels more natural to us.
| blago wrote:
| Good. Then we both agree that date formats tend to
| reflect spoken language, not unit cardinality. FWIW
| English is my second language. I'm sorry if my
| ethnocentricity offended you.
| [deleted]
| smcl wrote:
| > We say January 4th, 1970
|
| I'd say "the fourth of January". Also, quick question -
| what do you call Independence Day in the USA? :)
|
| Both ways are valid and can sound fine, it just depends on
| the locale and context.
| lordgroff wrote:
| You could be Canada. MM-DD-YYYY? DD-MM-YYYY? Unless you're in
| Quebec, you never have a clue. Government officially
| recommends YYYY-MM-DD due to this, but in the real world it's
| wild west.
| majewsky wrote:
| I'm a German in an international work environment. Since
| I'm also fed up with this endless confusion, I'm sneakily
| forcing YYYY-MM-DD on everyone by quietly editing every
| instance of a date that I find in the wild, and it's
| progressing rather well.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Oh you deviant, you! I'm inspired. Keep it up.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Probably an unpopular opinion, but despite its stupid order,
| I think M-D-Y makes complete sense for (American) English.
|
| Some languages (or dialects of English) say "twelve/the
| twelveth (of) January 2022", so 12-01-2022 is the obvious
| notation. Many English dialects (the majority, given that
| it's how America does it?) would say "January twelveth,
| 2022", so 01-12-2022.
|
| It's not that the notation is spun around, some versions of
| English just pronounce the dates backwards! This is the exact
| opposite of the question asked about numbers, where English
| (usually, mostly) follows the "logical" order.
|
| As language is subjective, I don't think there's a right or
| wrong way to pronounce and order things. The West doesn't use
| lakh and crore, but there's no reason why the short scale is
| any better. People just decided to say things one way and
| stick to it.
| Someone wrote:
| So, you're argument is that US English makes two mistakes,
| so it's fine?
|
| I think that, in some cases, some systems are objectively
| better than others because they are simpler. YYYY-MM-DD is
| such a case. Given that it hasn't 'won' globally over
| others, it seems it is not that much better, though.
|
| hh:mm:ss is one, too, not because no objectively better
| ones exist, but because none of them get used (using mixed-
| base base 24, base 60, base 60, plus, when using
| milliseconds, base 1,000 doesn't make sense, but we didn't
| manage to replace it
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time), so we're
| stuck with it.
|
| That may have to do with the fact that it breaks down for
| larger units, anyways. We could have a 10-day week, but for
| months and years, it's impossible to avoid things getting
| messy.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The way a language work is not a "mistake". It's simply
| how language works. People are not robots and they will
| exhibit illogical behaviours if that's what feels better
| to them.
|
| YYYY-MM-DD is probably the clearest way to express dates
| for computers only because it's not ambiguous and it's
| easy to sort.
|
| Decimal time was a mistake. We cannot group our 365.24
| days given by nature in a round, base 10 number so any
| attempts to make the entire system decimal is foolish. We
| could divide the day in 10 hours with each 100 seconds,
| but that would mean redefining all SI units to use this
| new second as a base. Distance is defined as the time it
| takes for light in a vacuum to travel a certain distance,
| we'd need to change that distance and all other units OR
| have the "scientific second" and the "metric second".
| wruza wrote:
| A nitpick, 365.2425. Don't forget 400 year cycle!
|
| But I wouldn't mind to have a lunch at '43' (from 43200)
| and go home at '65', without redefining SI.
| unbanned wrote:
| I've started warming to M-D-Y. Monthly cadence is more usual
| in business, so you can easier prioritise thoughts during
| conversation over D-M-Y
| barbarbar wrote:
| Isn't the last part:
|
| nine hundred and seventy five?
| bserge wrote:
| See how easy it is to get confused? :D
| azernik wrote:
| The point is that the way you say "seventy five" in German is
| "five and seventy"
| davidkunz wrote:
| in pseudo English (meaning a direct translation) it is "nine
| hundred five and seventy", in real English it is "nine
| hundred and seventy five"
| barbarbar wrote:
| I somehow missed you wrote pseudo english. Not sure how I
| managed that.
| davidkunz wrote:
| No worries!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is the short-scale / long-scale naming convention for
| powers of ten. See:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale
|
| Million (10^6) / milliard (10^9) / billion (10^12) is, or at
| least was, common in British English, where American English is
| million / billion / trillion.
|
| Numbers above 999 million were typically written as, e.g.,
| "thousand million (10^9), million million (10^12), etc.
|
| Long scale also has _billiard_ and _trilliard_.
|
| American usage seems to be dominant now, the UK officially
| converted in 1974.
| cryptica wrote:
| It's only backwards for the last 2-digit numbers. Once you go
| into the hundreds and beyond, it's read from left to right. I
| think most Germans probably don't even realize it. They just
| recall all 2-digit numbers from memory.
|
| In French, to an outsider, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (99) literally
| sounds like 4 * 20 + 10 + 9... But most french people will think
| of 'quatre-vingt-dix' as a single word (90) not thinking of
| quatre (4), vingt (20) and dix (10) as 3 different words. This is
| especially true because a lot of French words and names have a
| hyphen in them so French people see the hyphen more as an
| integral part of the word rather than a separator.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > It's only backwards for the last 2-digit numbers. Once you go
| into the hundreds and beyond, it's read from left to right.
|
| Well, no, because "twenty three thousand" will be "three and
| twenty thousand". Ditto for millions.
| folli wrote:
| It's still no match for French numbers: quatre-vingt-dix (four-
| twenty-ten) for 90.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| nonante!
| ginko wrote:
| Or Danish where 90 is halvfems or (5 - 1/2) * 20
| Symbiote wrote:
| 95 could be spoken as "fifteen and four score" in English,
| and I'm told my great grandfather did this, though people
| thought he was old fashioned.
|
| It would not be the Danish "five and half the fifth score"
| though. This is crazy.
| hjek wrote:
| ... which is especially embarrassing because they got rid of
| the problem in Swedish and Norwegian.
| daneel_w wrote:
| With one small exception in Swedish. We still do it
| backwards for some numbers in the 10-19 range. 13 = tretton
| (three ten), 14 = fjorton (four ten), and so on.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Yeah but I'd never blame someone for telling me "nonante", the
| Belgian (and more correct latin) variant.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| There's a joke in French:
|
| What is 20*4?
|
| Answer: 80 because multiplication is commutative.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Yet, Commutative Algebra is a German invention.
| Bud wrote:
| French is not actually that weird; it's just weird from 80-99.
| From 10-79, it's just like English handles it. They just never
| came up with single words for 80 and 90.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| It's weird form 70-79 as well! To say 79, you need to say
| sixty-ten-nine!
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| But they actually did! Septante, huitant/octante and nonante
| are real French words. Only the French don't want to use
| them.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| Note that you cannot use heptante for septante.
| smoe wrote:
| I think various french speaking regions outside France do use
| single words for those. E.g. in neighboring Switzerland I
| learned 70, 80, and 90 as septante, huitante and nonante if I
| remember correctly (I'm from the german speaking part)
| Bud wrote:
| Yes, they do. Belgian French has "nonante", for instance,
| which would be better, but which just never caught on in
| "standard" French. It appears in my Cassell's French
| Dictionary, but it's marked "dial." for dialect.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| It's also weird for 50-59. English does not say "fourty
| twelve" ("quarante-douze").
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Neither does French, you're confusing 50 with 70.
| https://frm.wiktionary.org/wiki/quarante-douze
|
| Edit: 50, not 60.
| bramjans wrote:
| At least in Belgium we fixed that with "septante"
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| But making things completely logical would have been too
| much for us so we kept quatre-vingt.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth,
| upon this continent, a new nation
| kello wrote:
| If you think about it we say numbers "backwards" in english in
| the teens: "four-teen, fif-teen, six-teen" and so on.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| It may have to do with the fact that, in German, by default the
| first syllable of a word is stressed, and in two-digit numbers
| the least significant digit is actually the more distinctive one
| in ordinary usage (in terms of wanting to express an exact
| number). Note how in English, the stress is usually on the least
| significant digit as well ("twenty- _three_ ").
| wycy wrote:
| German numbers are basically written as:
|
| 10n 10n-1 ... 104 103 102 100 101
|
| Descending powers of 10 then the old switcheroo at the end.
| hibbelig wrote:
| The switcheroo happens in every three-digit group: When you
| read the number 123,123,123 out loud, you say "drei(3)-und-
| zwanzig(20)" three times. (I've used comma as the thousand
| separator here.)
| [deleted]
| chrizel wrote:
| German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I
| still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers
| I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just
| confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other
| end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and
| not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much
| prefer English, it is much more logical.
|
| Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it
| up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way
| of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even
| they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we
| say numbers.
| hulitu wrote:
| German is an LSB language.
| moffkalast wrote:
| And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for
| example:
|
| German: einhundertfunfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy)
|
| Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy)
|
| Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring
| languages:
|
| Polish: sto siedemdziesiat piec (one hundred seventy five)
|
| Czech: sto sedmdesat pet (one hundred seventy five)
|
| Slovak: sto sedemdesiat pat (one hundred seventy five)
|
| Hungarian: szaz hetven ot (one hundred seventy five)
|
| Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five)
|
| Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five)
|
| Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic
|
| You get the idea.
|
| Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also
| stupid number system.
|
| Sincerely, a Slovenian.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| You are also forgetting that you are comparing two totally
| different language trees (Germanic and Slavic) ... ignoring
| Italian for the moment.
|
| You essentially listed German and several dialects of the
| same language. If you had listed several of the German
| language dialects that also slightly vary how they say the
| number in the same German format/order you would have had a
| list of equal if not greater number of support for the German
| format.
|
| I think that may also provide a bit of a clue as to why the
| order/format is different since it must have happened some
| time after English formed from the German language, possibly
| when/because the British adopted the format/order of the
| Romans. But that's just speculation/hypothesis on my part. I
| suspect there are people who have a better insight into how
| that separation happened.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| You put so much effort into that and then totally missed
| French? four-twenty-ten-seven ... yup, 97, of course.
| Multiplication and addition required.
|
| That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of
| complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test
| scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.
|
| Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too
| essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"
| gruez wrote:
| >That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of
| complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test
| scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.
|
| AFAIK the net effect is that languages with complicated
| number representations do worse on math tests.
|
| >Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too
| essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"
|
| Can you say that the same about English? ie. four-ty = 4 x
| 10
|
| edit: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-
| might-be...
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| >Can you say that the same about English?
|
| It's similar but I don't think it qualifies as the same
| since we do not say "four tens". Forty is a concept in
| itself, just like suffix -s for plural is a separate
| concept from singular. Suffixes and prefixes are
| modifiers. We don't ordinarily say, for example, "many
| apple", we say "apples".
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| When I say eight-ten in Chinese, my mind is thinking of
| the singular concept '80', not 8 tens.
|
| The same as when I say eight-y in English.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There was some theory that because the first ten digits
| in Chinese are very short phonetically that it is easier
| to keep numbers in your head.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The first numbers are short in every language. That
| doesn't distinguish Chinese in any way.
|
| Taking some salient examples, in English 9 out of 10 of
| those numbers are single syllables and 7 is two. In
| French, all ten are single syllables.
| toephu2 wrote:
| It does distinguish Chinese. It's quicker to count to 10
| in Chinese than in most other languages.
|
| Malcolm Gladwell did some good research ('Outliers' is a
| great book) in this area.
|
| Chinese are generally better at math than other
| ethnicities precisely because of their language.
|
| _Take a look at the following list of numbers:
| 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look
| away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence
| before saying them out loud again.
|
| Gladwell points out that the English speakers have about
| 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly,
| but the Chinese are almost certain to get it right every
| time. He explains, "Because as human beings we store
| digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds.
| We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read
| within that two second span. "And Chinese speakers get
| that list of numbers--4,8,5,3,9,7,6--right every time
| because--unlike English speakers--their language allows
| them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds,"
| Gladwell adds._
|
| https://gineersnow.com/students/best-explanation-asians-
| good...
| zzt123 wrote:
| I'll be damned, I just tried that and it was
| exceptionally easier to do in Mandarin, a language that I
| have to think to count in, than in English.
| perl4ever wrote:
| That seems to me like a lack of imagination on his part
| even assuming he has some grounds for the "2 second"
| rule.
|
| How does he know that people remember it via "reading out
| loud to themselves"?
|
| Maybe they visualize it instead.
|
| Maybe people chunk it into a 3 digit and a 4 digit
| number, like a phone number.
|
| Why should "reading out loud to yourself" be limited to
| the speed of actual speech anyway?
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Thanks Malcolm, very scientific. As we all know, maths is
| all about memorising short sequences of numbers, and
| always being sure to say them out loud or at the very
| least sub-vocalise them. My maths teacher always liked to
| read us our numbers like it was storytime, gather round
| kids, we're going to learn about the lottery again, so
| many of you struggled with that last week. And of course,
| those Asians beat us every time, us poor whites could
| barely string three or four numbers together.
| loudmax wrote:
| Well if we're just speculating here, I'll add that since
| Chinese is tonal, Chinese speakers will remember the tune
| of sequence, not just a list of values. It's easier to
| remember a melody than a phone number.
| ajuc wrote:
| Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example
| English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my
| native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like
| they were talking to infants or dogs :)
|
| You don't normally use it for numbers but you certainly
| can, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
|
| Another useful mnemonic that for me works even better
| than melody is rhythm. I noticed that I have about
| 20-notes buffer for last-heard rhythmic phrase even if I
| wasn't paying attention at the time. So for example after
| I ran down a flight of stairs I can count them by
| remembering the rhythm of my steps and adding them. My
| friend who has way better short term memory than me can't
| do this, but he can see the image he was looking at
| recently. Now that's cheating :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example
| English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my
| native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like
| they were talking to infants or dogs
|
| It might just be more obvious since the English patterns
| are unfamiliar.
|
| One of the more surreal experiences I've had was watching
| an English-language news broadcast in China. The
| presenter was speaking English and had obviously put in a
| lot of effort trying to learn what natural English
| sounded like. The general pattern of intonation over her
| sentences was quite realistic for English.
|
| What made it surreal was that the intonation didn't match
| the words. Everything she said, it was like she was using
| the intonation pattern of some other sentence and
| applying it to a completely different sentence.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| In Arabic, numbers from 1-10 are waaHid, ithnayn,
| thalaatha, arba:a, khamsa, sitta, sab:a, thamaaniya,
| tis:a, and :ashara. No monosyllabic numbers, and 8 has
| _four syllables_. And even these are short compared to
| the numbers in Inuktitut.
| glandium wrote:
| Interestingly, in Algerian Arabic, while other numbers
| are similar, two is different. It's zouj (one syllable).
| Except when counting e.g. twenty two, where it is similar
| to ithnayn (more like t'nin)
|
| BTW, it's similar to German in that regard, because it's
| two-twenty.
|
| Also interestingly, the way 8 sounds in Algerian Arabic
| would be 2 syllables. Although take it with a grain of
| salt because it's third-hand information. I learned this
| from my father, who's not native (but has lived in
| Algeria in his childhood)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This is kind of a tangent, but I understand that the
| native title of the Arabian Nights is 'alf layla wa
| layla, the book of "a thousand nights and a night".
|
| What is the "one" night in that title? Any chance wa is
| related to waaHid?
| gfaure wrote:
| No. "wa" in Arabic corresponds to "and" in English.
| nousermane wrote:
| Majority of French speakers say 80 as "4 x 20":
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quatre-vingts#French
| varajelle wrote:
| Not "4x20", but "4 20", and in a single word that means
| "80" without thinking about 4 and 20.
|
| When you say eighteen, you think just "18" and not "8
| teens". (Similarly, when you say "backwards" you think of
| the direction, not of "back wards")
| gknapp wrote:
| It's easy to pick on the weirdness of french numbers, but
| honestly "quatre-vingt" ends up just being a word like
| "eighty" in its own right. No French speaker is multiplying
| 20s in their head.
|
| Probably the only true weirdness is the 70s and 90s because
| they use the teen words like douze and treize, but that's
| honestly where the weirdness ends, and larger numbers
| follow very consistent rules.
| dstroot wrote:
| Long ago "forty" in English may have begun as "four ten"
| which most likely became "fourteen" but four tens could
| have maybe become forty.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| "Fourteen" (four and ten) would have been from "scoring
| numbers", where you get to twenty (a score), keep track
| of the scores separately, and start over. Up to twelve,
| we used a duodecimal/dozenal system (a separate word for
| each number). That was also common in other non-Germanic
| Indo-European languages, notably the Brythonic Celtic
| languages (and various versions of Brythonic scoring
| numbers are still used in parts of Britain, depending on
| the pre-English dialect spoken in the area and changes
| over time, especially in children's games). French
| numbering still shows signs of "scoring", especially in
| the 60/70 and even moreso in the 80/90 region.
| jmchuster wrote:
| Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like
| English, but without the inconsistencies.
|
| 4444 = Four thousand, four hundred, four ten, four.
|
| Though it is interesting that they group by powers of 10k
| instead of powers of 1k.
| didip wrote:
| Chinese is sweet and consistent until 10,000. They
| introduced a new word for it, wan(Mo ) instead of 10 x
| 1000.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why is that inconsistent? There are also separate words
| for 1, 10, 100, and 1,000, so why not 10,000 ?
| novok wrote:
| If your number separators are every 3, then it feels
| weird. If it's every 4, then it does not. Change numbers
| into 1, 10, 1000, 1'0000 and then it doesn't feel like
| it's going against your writing habits.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like
| English, but without the inconsistencies.
|
| Not really. "One thousand five" is 1,005 in English, but
| it's 1500 in Mandarin. For 1005 you'd need to say "one
| thousand zero five".
| numpad0 wrote:
| Could that be where "3V3" style notation came from? In
| electronics, 3V3 means 3.3V, not 3/3V or 3x3V or 3.003V,
| and likewise 1R5 means 1.5 Ohm. It's handy but took me a
| while to get used to.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Don't know; Chinese usage seems unlikely to have been
| influential in the relevant time period.
|
| There is another oddity in Chinese numbers which requires
| a bit of grammar explanation:
|
| Chinese requires measure words when applying numbers to
| nouns. English has count nouns and mass nouns ("three
| crackers", where "cracker" is a count noun, versus "three
| loaves of bread", where "bread" is a mass noun); Chinese
| has only mass nouns. [1] Thus:
|
| San Ge Ren "three (San ) people (Ren )", with Ge being
| a measure word appropriate for people
|
| Yi Zhi Gou "one (Yi ) dog (Gou )", with Zhi being a
| measure word appropriate for animals
|
| Yi Shou Ge "one song (Ge )", with Shou being a measure
| word appropriate for poetry
|
| Most nouns use Ge .
|
| The oddity is that Ban ("one half") occurs before the
| measure word when it represents the total amount, but
| after when it's a modification.
|
| Yi Ge Xiao Shi "one hour (Xiao Shi )"
|
| Liang Ge Xiao Shi "two (Liang ) hours"
|
| Ban Ge Xiao Shi "half an hour"
|
| Yi Ge Ban Xiao Shi "an hour and a half"
|
| This also occurs with money, where it's probably the same
| grammatical rule:
|
| San Kuai "Y=3"
|
| San Kuai Er "Y=3.20"
|
| But for this to be fully consistent, I'd expect Ling Ge
| Ban Xiao Shi "zero and a half hours" where in reality
| Ban Ge Xiao Shi is used.
|
| [1] Some people have argued that since e.g. "one day" Yi
| Tian has no measure word between Yi and Tian , Tian
| must be a noun that requires no measure word. This is
| wrong; it is a measure word that requires no noun. An
| easy way to see this is that reduplication carries the
| same meaning that generally applies to reduplicated
| measure words, and not the meaning that applies to
| reduplication of nouns -- Tian Tian means "every day" in
| the same way that Ge Ge means "every [one]"; it does not
| mean "cute little day" in the same way that Gou Gou
| means "doggie".
| pezezin wrote:
| Japanese is like that too (probably got it from Chinese),
| with the added fun that it has two sets of numerals: the
| indigenous Japanese one and the borrowed Chinese one. So
| you not only need to memorize the counting word but also
| which kind of numeral to use.
| novok wrote:
| Can you just say the measure words like you do in English
| then? Like "I'll have 3 loaves please". I guess it would
| be like San Ge or similar?
|
| Also thanks for saying that they're equivalent to things
| like "Schools of fish" or "loaves of bread". They make
| way more sense to me now!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Like "I'll have 3 loaves please". I guess it would be
| like San Ge or similar?
|
| That's it exactly, and it's very common. Any time the
| noun is clear from context, you can leave it out. (You
| shouldn't leave out the measure word though - where in
| English you might have "I'll take three", in Chinese
| you'd still want San Ge .)
|
| If you walk into a restaurant, someone will ask Ji Wei
| "how many?". Ji is a question word for small numbers,
| and Wei is a (formal, polite) measure word for people.
| quesera wrote:
| No, that's just pragmatism. The origins happen to be
| US/American:
|
| It's the most compact, non-ambiguous representation, and
| avoids symbols that print poorly or are not available
| everywhere.
| jeromegv wrote:
| As a French speaker, you don't tend to see those as
| multiplication
|
| You associate "quatre vingt" as meaning 80. In your head
| it's 80. You don't think four times twenty. So it's not as
| complicated as it looks. I don't see kids really getting
| that wrong.
| fantod wrote:
| Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago
| asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with
| this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking
| about because I had never in my life even noticed it.
| Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply,
| after all.
| emilecantin wrote:
| It's even funnier when you're learning multiplications
| and divisions. We still have to think when we do 4 times
| 20, and every time we realize it's right there in the
| name.
| detaro wrote:
| As someone who only had basic high-school "French as a
| third language" and was never good at it, I'd still agree
| with that. it's one "symbol" so to speak for mental
| parsing.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I get that. It's the power of the brain's user of
| generalizations, i.e., patterns or classes, to represent
| things. The brain clearly also handles disambiguation far
| better than we consciously know to do. It seems like the
| brain essentially has a class named quatre vingt and it
| has a pattern of 4*20 that resolved to the concept of 80
| which means 20+20+20+20.
|
| It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term
| for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and
| English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that
| French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while
| the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the
| Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman
| numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far
| closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the
| ones that moved to the British isles and became the
| English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems
| that those interplays and intersections with the cultures
| are what determined how French language numbering worked
| based on when and where and what they had contact with.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 80 maybe, but 91-99 are properly ridiculous. Sure its
| easy to get it, but it highlights deeper issue I've had
| since I've started learning french - its not elegant nor
| easy language, rather a 'spaghetti code' one, a mess of
| rules and tons of exceptions, and many things defy logic
| and are there 'because its like that and you have to
| memorize it'. You can have great talk on B1 level for
| example in English or German, with French you are still
| often lost quickly unless everybody else tries hard to
| dumb it down for you.
|
| There is an institute in France hose sole purpose is to
| guard language, I wonder why they didn't find the
| motivation to clean it up a bit. It would make it much
| more attractive for outsiders and make it more global.
|
| And its not just me, literally everybody I speak to who
| attempted to learn french has similar experience. Either
| they suck it up, face often humiliation from native
| speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see
| senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and
| pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you
| mixed gender of a noun) or often just give up.
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't think "cleaning up" a language talked by so many
| people in the world is reasonable because some people
| have trouble learning it.
|
| > Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from
| native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something
| to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little
| kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting
| because you mixed gender of a noun).
|
| I'm not sure if it's a language problem or a people
| problem. I often encounter people that mix the gender of
| nouns, and I don't really care about it. It's a lot to
| learn and not very important. Just like some people don't
| have a great accent, that's how it is, it doesn't stop
| people from communicating. Same for the people that I
| know, unless we're asked we wouldn't bother correcting
| someone that "le table" is actually "la table" because
| tables are female.
|
| On my side, I find the pronunciation of English to be
| very hard to learn and to master, and am scared of
| sounding stupid whenever I talk English, so I avoid it,
| and end up not being good at it, so I can understand the
| sentiment.
| ldrndll wrote:
| If it's any consolation, I find English pronunciation
| very difficult, and I'm a native speaker. It surprises me
| that in my thirties I still regularly encounter
| situations where I want to use a word and realise I've
| never heard it spoken before, so have no idea if the
| pronunciation I use in my head when reading it is
| correct.
|
| I also often hear others mispronounce words; friends,
| colleagues, even on TV.
|
| I guess my point is that if you're mispronouncing English
| words you're speaking it like a native!
| pjerem wrote:
| > Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from
| native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something
| to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little
| kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting
| because you mixed gender of a noun) or often just give
| up.
|
| I'm French and, at least in my circle, I've never seen a
| native French << humiliating >> a non-native trying to
| speak French.
|
| And to me there is two reasons : - we know our language
| is difficult to learn - we are really bad when it comes
| to speak any foreign language
|
| As*oles are totally a thing (especially in the
| banking/financial sector) but most French people are
| admirative of anyone who speaks more than one language.
| Because most of us can't.
| aktau wrote:
| This was cleaned up in the Belgian variant of French:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French.
|
| - 70 = septante (versus soixante-dix, which is 60-10)
|
| - 80 = huitante (versus quatre-vingt, which is 40-20),
| *EDIT*: wrong, see below.
|
| - 90 = nonante (versus quatre-vingt-dix, which is
| 40-20-10)
|
| The article also mentions something interesting I didn't
| know:
|
| > The use of septante for "seventy" and nonante for
| "ninety", in contrast to Standard French soixante-dix
| (literally "sixty-ten") and quatre-vingt-dix'("four-
| twenty-ten"). Those former words occur also in Swiss
| French. Unlike the Swiss, however, Belgians never use
| huitante for quatre-vingts ("four twenties"), with the
| use of octante in the local Brussels dialect as being the
| only exception. Although they are considered Belgian and
| Swiss words, septante and nonante were common in France
| until around the 16th century, when the newer forms began
| to dominate.[4]
|
| *EDIT*: This doesn't appear to be true, Belgian French
| speakers also say quatre-vingt for 80.
| soco wrote:
| The Swiss French speakers found a way around that:
| nonante. Ninety, the Swiss way, not bothered by the
| French Academy.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Would you call 'four hundred' multiplication? That's a
| strange way of looking at it for me.
| kkylin wrote:
| As a native Mandarin speaker, I don't tend to think of the
| "ten" as a ten. If anything, for me it conjures up an image
| of the number of 0s. So, the "hundreds" part in "four
| hundreds" would just means four followed by two zeros, etc.
| I may even have been taught this as a child; can't
| remember. Anyway, no arithmetic involved, at least not
| explicitly.
|
| I don't know that this generalizes -- other Mandarin
| speakers may have a different experience. I'm _really_
| curious how Chinese-speaking people thought about these
| things before Arabic numerals, but not sure we can ever
| have a clear answer to that question.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > four-twenty-ten-seven ... yup, 97, of course
|
| As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as
| ninety. Nobody thinks about this in term of 4 * 20 + 10.
| Although, I remember that it confused me a little bit when
| I learned how to count.
|
| That being said, I'd be in favour to switch to the
| Swiss/Belgian/Canadian way and replace "quatre vingt dix"
| by "nonante".
| belval wrote:
| Sad fact: French Canadian don't use the (much better)
| Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante and the awareness
| in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch.
|
| It's a shame because soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and
| quatre-vingt-dix are confusing to write (I probably made
| a mistake somewhere).
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > French Canadian don't use the (much better)
| Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante
|
| Sorry for the mistake (I did check on wikipedia before
| adding Canada do the list but got it wrong).
|
| > the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope
| for a switch.
|
| Same in France. I believe most of us regard
| "septante/octante/nonante" as amusing and exotic
| sounding. Sadly, I've never heard anyone advocating for a
| switch.
| glandium wrote:
| Note that Belgians ans Swiss don't agree on 80. It's
| huitante on one side and octante on the other (but I
| don't remember which is which)
| belval wrote:
| Interesting, I knew Swiss said octante and my Belgian
| friends all say octante as well. Perhaps it's a regional
| thing?
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| I'm a french canadian and I've never in my life heard
| someone use "septante/octante/nonante". I understand the
| difficulty while learning French but, as a native
| speaker, we don't even think about it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| French is definitely weird in that it introduces
| multiplication, but the addition operands are still in
| descending order as with English.
|
| > I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to
| higher IQ and higher education test scoring
|
| Probably not much. I doubt francophones are doing
| multiplication when they think of the number 80 any more
| than anglophones do addition when we think of the number
| 14. Rather, speakers presumably both memorize the names of
| each number and move on with life.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of
| complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test
| scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.
|
| I would say more that simplification makes the boring bits
| easy and allows the mind to concentrate on more interesting
| higher-level concepts. As someone who has attended a range
| of educational institutions for the same courses, one thing
| that really stood out to me about the "top-level" ones was
| that there was none of this "life must be hard" attitude.
| For the core material, the teaching was excellent and
| designed to make it as easy to learn for students as
| possible to learn. Then while "lesser" universities were
| examining students on those core materials (often with
| questions they'd seen before), the top universities asking
| novel questions on material that hadn't even been
| explicitly covered, but which the students could reasonably
| be expected to answer on because they had a really solid
| grasp of the core stuff.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "life must be hard"
|
| Ah yes, this is very german.
|
| If it is not a grind, it is not really work you are
| doing.
|
| And it is still kind of a honor badge to moan about how
| little you sleep, as this shows how hard you are working
| all day and the ones sleeping the most less, are the
| hardest.
|
| (But I do see some healthy change in that regard)
| DenisM wrote:
| > the ones sleeping the most less
|
| Good god, this is beautiful. Is this a German idiom?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Not literally, as far as I know (I am also still
| wondering, of whether it was correct grammar), but there
| are plenty of:
|
| "Morgenstund hat gold im Mund"
|
| morning time is gold
|
| (to which I agree at times)
|
| or
|
| "Der fruhe Vogel fangt den Wurm"
|
| The early bird catches the worm.
|
| (to where I say, maybe the worm should have slept in that
| day)
| hamburglar wrote:
| I think the poster you are responding to is referring to
| the "beauty" (sarcastically, I assume) of the phrasing
| "most less" instead of "least." It would be right in line
| with the confusing way numbers are spoken.
| truculent wrote:
| A trivial aside: English used to have something similar in
| a "score" being 20. So "four-score and ten" would be 90,
| not too dissimilar from the French.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| English still has it. Nobody took it away. It's still in
| use.
| FascistDonut wrote:
| How? What is a common modern day use?
| FroshKiller wrote:
| The same meaning of a group of twenty. "There must have
| been a score of cars at the drive-thru." It hasn't
| changed.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Obviously Americans know it from the Gettysburg Address
| where Lincoln referred to the US being founded "four
| score and seven years ago", but he was being
| intentionally poetic, but you may not count 19th century
| as "modern" (even though from the linguistic perspective
| it is), but people often say things like "there are
| scores of movies where the protagonist finds out he is a
| prophesized hero" even today.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I think it's still used a bit in British English, along
| with other things that strike the American ear as archaic
| like 'stones' and 'fortnights'.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| No, it is a word like ananas or worm, an image in your
| head.
|
| Nobody in France would do any multiplication, it is just a
| word.
|
| We have a weird language ('eaux' is 'o', imagine that?) but
| this is not one of the crazy things.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| And English: "six-teen" (six and ten) and "Eight-y-Seven"
| (eight times ten, plus seven)
| robbedpeter wrote:
| >>Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.
|
| Citation needed?
|
| Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. Removing
| complexity is difficult. Einstein, Feynman, Newton, and
| innumerable others are lauded for simplifying enormously
| complex ideas to the point of comprehension by the masses.
|
| Oversimplifying is bad, because it implies lost
| information. Simplification itself is a form of
| sophisticated articulation.
|
| More efficient representations of numbers are generally
| associated with better performance in math, historically.
| Roman numerals being a prime example of unnecessary
| complexity, compared to the maths being done by Indian
| people, and so on. Civilization tends to abandon
| conventions that are superseded in advantage.
|
| Making things more difficult to formulate for structural
| reasons unrelated to the problem at hand is inefficient.
|
| Having inefficient numbering in language is wasted energy
| at best.
| solidangle wrote:
| Dutch: honderdvijfenzeventig (hundred five and seventy)
| [deleted]
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yep, seems like there is actually one more:
|
| Danish: hundrede femoghalvfjerds (hundred five and seventy)
|
| And the rest I've checked now:
|
| Romanian: o suta saptezeci si cinci (hundred seventy five)
|
| French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen)
|
| Swedish: hundra sjuttiofem (hundred seventy five)
|
| Finnish: sata seitsemankymmentaviisi (hundred seventy five)
|
| Norweigan: hundre og syttifem (hundred seventy five)
|
| Spanish: ciento setenta y cinco (hundred seventy five)
| qw wrote:
| Norway has an alternative that is the same as the
| Germans. (175 - hundred and five and seventy)
|
| It was more popular in the past, but is still used in
| many dialects.
| eitland wrote:
| I grew up with both the old one and the new one so I
| sometimes say it the old way and I am almost happy that
| my kids don't understand it immediately so I have to
| correct myself.
|
| Fun fact: it was actually decided in Stortinget (the
| supreme legislature of Norway) in November 1950 and
| implemented in July 1951, as far as I know the only time
| a matter of how to pronounce something has been decided
| at that level.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the Danish is actually a little more complicated
|
| the word for 60 in Danish is tres the word for 50 in
| Danish is halvtreds - so basically half 60 (I guess cause
| the original counting system in the Nordic region was
| based on 20s?), and since Danes don't pronounce the d and
| the halv is quick sometimes you get confused in what is
| being said.
|
| But then the word for 80 is firs, fee-es with a partially
| swallowed r sound in there somewhere. and 70 is
| halvfjerds - half firs.
|
| The word for 90 is halvfems - half fives.
|
| a Dane speaking quickly can confuse others really quickly
| with these numbers as to whether it was said
| 50,60,70,80,90 and then you put the second number in
| 'backwards' as said, so
|
| 92 is to og halvfems - toe oh hellfems and so forth, but
| said very quickly with a tendency to not fully pronounce
| all of a word.
| BorisJensen wrote:
| The system is actually based on scores, 20, which is
| called a snes in older Danish, so halvtreds is short for
| halv tredje snes, the half third score, and 60 is tres,
| short for tre snese, i.e. three scores and so on. So for
| the tens between 50 and 90, we count scores, and if it's
| not a whole number of scores, we name it the half of the
| score that we are into. It's also preserved in a very
| infrequently used variant word for 80, firsindstyve,
| which is just 4 score, more explicitly (tyve is the
| modern word for twenty). In conclusion: Yes, the Danish
| number system is relatively silly.
| xorcist wrote:
| > the original counting system in the Nordic region was
| based on 20s?
|
| No other Nordic language is like that.
|
| It's probably not a coindicence that the same system the
| French use. Apparently French was the coolest language
| you could speak in the 1700s and all the nobility did it.
|
| Only the Danish swalllowed the "twenty" part of the it,
| so it's no longer possible to deduce any meaning from
| hearing the word. Add that to the fact that "half" has a
| universally accepted meaning too, but should be
| understood here as "ten-less-than".
|
| So I think Danish wins the most bizarre counting system
| over the French. And the French is far more so than the
| German. All they're guilty of is being careless with the
| ordering of numerals.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >> the original counting system in the Nordic region was
| based on 20s?
|
| >No other Nordic language is like that.
|
| ok, I was just guessing, hence the question mark.
|
| But I guess Boris Jensen described the reason
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369172
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Danish is in fact slightly more complicated. They have a
| vigesimal system with a base of 20, with halvfjerds, or
| halffourth, meaning 31/2 times 20. So rather hundred five
| and three-and-a-half score.
| tribaal wrote:
| French should translate to "hundred sixty fifteen" which
| is another level of aberration altogether (I'm French)
| lr1970 wrote:
| Does the cognitive energy expended by French to do basic
| counting conditions their brain from early childhood for
| mathematical proficiency resulting in so many great
| mathematicians whose native language was French?
| </end_of_joke>
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah right I remember hearing somewhere that you guys don't
| have words for 70, 80, and 90 and do this odd sum of two
| thing. I suppose there are worse ways than the reverse
| German :D
| speedgoose wrote:
| The French language has such words, but Frenchmen don't
| use them. For example they prefer to say the old
| fashioned "quatre-vingt-dix" (4 - 20 - 10) instead of the
| perfectly fine "nonante" that French speakers in Belgium
| use.
| tribaal wrote:
| It's the same in Switzerland, which makes an order of
| magnitude more sense IMO:
|
| Soixante
|
| Septante
|
| Huitante
|
| Nonante
|
| Cent
| [deleted]
| fhars wrote:
| What I always wonder, do French programmers generalize
| this numbering scheme to pronounce 0x4B as _quatre seize
| onze_?
| [deleted]
| bistro wrote:
| More precisely, French (cent soixante quinze) is
| actually: hundred sixty fifteen. Seventies, eighties
| (quatre-vingt = four twenties), and nineties (quatre-
| vingt-dix = four twenties and ten) are a mess in most
| French dialects.
| spockz wrote:
| In Dutch it is "honderd vijf en zeventig" (one hundred five
| and seventy). So the same as in German. Do we actually know
| the origin or reason?
| jhncls wrote:
| Even more loyal than the French to the ancient vigesimal
| counting system are the Basque[0] and the Welsh[1].
|
| Traditional Welsh has constructions as:
|
| - 16: un ar bymtheg ("one on five-ten") - 18: deunaw ("two
| nine") - 41: deugain ac un ("two twenty and one") - 71: un ar
| ddeg a thrigain ("one on ten on three twenty")
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_numerals
| froh wrote:
| French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen)
| gbil wrote:
| taking the opportunity to say that the most voted answer in
| stackexchange is wrong for Greek, in Greek for example 175 is
| ekaton ebdomenta pente (one hundred seventy five)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The Dutch get numbers "backwards," too. My poor daughter
| makes mistakes with writing numerals all the time. Like,
| writing "27" for tweeenzeventig. Sigh. She will learn
| eventually. I'm sure the mental challenge just makes people
| strong here, like the bicycling in the freezing rain.
| someotherperson wrote:
| To add to the list, Arabic also counts the same way.
|
| my'@ wkhms@ wsb`wn (One hundred and five and seventy)
| mro_name wrote:
| I suspect that the German way of speaking comes directly
| from arabic and the fact that we have adopted the whole
| numbering scheme, digits as well the name for 'digit'
| (ziffer) sounds like 'zero' which is the key innovation of
| the number scheme.
| de6u99er wrote:
| > And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175
| for example: > Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred
| seventy five) > Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic
|
| As a German speaker with Ex-Yugoslavian roots, I'd like to
| point out that you have a mistake in your list.
|
| In Serbo-Croatian (former official language of Yugoslavia)
| 175 (sto sedamdeset pet) is actually the order in which the
| number is written. Only between 10 and 20 the pronounciation
| is somewhat the other way around. But like the French
| colleague in this thread it could easily be argued that the
| numbers between 1 and 20 have their own words because it's
| not tri-deset but trinest for 13. This could be because e.g.
| tri-deset is actually used for 30, which sounds like three
| times ten. It seems Slovenian counting is more similar to
| German, while Serbo-Croatian is more similar to English.
|
| Serbo-Croatian counting examples: 1 - jedan
|
| 2 - dva
|
| 3 - tri
|
| 4 - cetiri
|
| 5 - pet
|
| 6 - sest
|
| 7 - sedam
|
| 8 - osam
|
| 9 - devet
|
| 10 - deset
|
| 11 - jedanest
|
| 12 - dvanest
|
| 13 - trinest
|
| 14 - cetrnest
|
| 15 - petnest
|
| 16 - sesnest
|
| 17 - sedamnest
|
| 18 - osamnest
|
| 19 - devetnest
|
| 20 - dvadeset
|
| 21 - dvadeset jedan
|
| 32 - trideset dva
|
| 43 - cetrdeset tri
|
| 54 - pedeset cetiri
|
| 65 - sesdeset pet
|
| 76 - sedamdeset sest
|
| 87 - osamdeset sedam
|
| 98 - devedeset osam
|
| 100 - sto
|
| 101 - sto jedan
|
| 111 - sto jedanest
|
| 121 - sto dvadeset jedan
|
| 212 - dvesto dvanest
|
| 222 - dvesto dvadeset dva
|
| ...
| iracic wrote:
| It would be rather jedanaest, dvanaest, trinaest (at least
| in Croatian) - your version sounds how it is shortened in
| pronounciation in some regions. Also sezdeset with "z".
| de6u99er wrote:
| I have been living in Austria all my life. I might not
| have misspelled some things :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very close to Polish.
| de6u99er wrote:
| My wife ist Polish. This might explain it.
| bogeholm wrote:
| I'll just add Danish: et hundrede og femoghalvfjerds (one
| hundred five and four scores where the fourth score is a
| half)
|
| Sincerely, a Dane :)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| "Hmm, having the most difficult to pronounce/hear phonetics
| in the world wasn't hard enough, we should also mess with
| the numbers" - the Danes, I presume
| mmcnl wrote:
| Same for Dutch.
|
| Honderd-vijf-en-zeventig. Hundred five and seventy.
| midasuni wrote:
| One hundred Five and Seventy is middle endian, neither big
| nor little.
|
| The only other example I can think of is the american date
| system
| tlogan wrote:
| My understanding is that was the way in Serbian-Croatian but
| it died out. I personally knew people born in early 1900s
| talking like that. But I can be wrong: it could be just
| Autro-Hungarian influence.
|
| Any real data on this?
| mimac wrote:
| Then you also have Slovenian dialects, where the number order
| is different again i.e. Prekmurscina - stou sendeset pet.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| If you want something completely insane check out standard
| French. 97 is "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" which translates
| directly to "four-twenty-ten-seven". Quebec French does this
| sanely though at least.
| johncoltrane wrote:
| No, it translates directly to "ninety-seven" or to however
| you spell "97" in any other language.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-
| word translation, is a translation of a text done by
| translating each word separately, without looking at how
| the words are used together in a phrase or sentence.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation
| johncoltrane wrote:
| I only knew term #1 and term #3, thanks.
|
| Let's prove that English is insane by making a literal
| translation of that Wikipedia definition in French:
|
| > Litteral traduction, direct traduction ou mot-pour-mot
| traduction, est le traduction de un texte fait par
| traduire chaque mot separement, sans regarder a comment
| le mots sont utilise ensemble dans un phrase ou phrase.
| schrijver wrote:
| If you're a native speaker I imagine that's true, but if
| you learned the language later in live it remains a pain.
| I feel comfortable discussing love, art and politics in
| French but I still dread writing down a phone number!
| Koshkin wrote:
| This is so sweet. J'adore le francais.
| xcambar wrote:
| Also, Belgians do that sanely too.
|
| 70: soixante-dix (FR) "sixty-ten". Septante (BE) is
| literally seventy (seven decades), which is much better.
|
| And so on and so forth for 80 (octante in BE) and 90
| (nonante).
|
| Edit: fixed seventy
| masklinn wrote:
| > 80 (octante in BE)
|
| Nope. That's switzerland, belgians completely illogically
| have kept the 20-based naming here.
| xcambar wrote:
| Thanks the for correction.
|
| So do Belgians do it 100% like the french? Or so they mix
| a bit of FR and CH?
| beardyw wrote:
| If your French is bad like mine you can get away with
| those even in France.
| xcambar wrote:
| I hope my french is okay.
| lkuty wrote:
| In Belgium (belgian french) we don't say "octante" for 80
| (said in Switzerland maybe) but "quatre-vingts" (four
| twenty. 4-20). So 87 is said "quatre-vingt-sept" (four
| twenty seven). For 70 and 90 it is right.
| anotherboffin wrote:
| Depends on the canton in Switzerland. To my knowledge
| most say "huitante" except for Geneva which says "quatre-
| vingt".
| Leherenn wrote:
| Most people I know (from various Romand cantons) actually
| use both a bit randomly, I assume due to the strong
| French influence. What's funny is that they don't realise
| it until you point it out.
|
| Octante as far as I know has been dead for a while and is
| not used anywhere, in Switzerland or elsewhere.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Sorry, but it's also "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" here in
| Quebec. We do manage haha (it's something you get used to /
| absorb as a native speaker, although it is of course a
| barrier for those learning the language)
|
| You're probably thinking of Belgium and Switzerland where
| 97 would be - as far as I understand - "nonante-sept"
|
| See this other StackExchange on the topic (and geographical
| exceptions to the octante/huitante (!)/nonante usage):
| https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/187/quelles-
| parti...
| [deleted]
| huachimingo wrote:
| Same in Catalan.
|
| 80 - vuitanta
| harperlee wrote:
| Four score and seven-ten years ago :)
| alkonaut wrote:
| That's about as odd as the danish "syv og halvfems" which
| is "seven and half five" meaning "seven and 4.5 twenties",
| so 97.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Yes, the "halvfems", "half five", could be translated as
| "half of the fifth twenty", or even "halfway of the fifth
| twenty (from the full fourth one)".
|
| Luckily it is only numbers 50 to 99 that work that way.
| 31 is simply "enogtredive", as in "one and three tens". A
| hundred is "hundred", not "fems", as it could be (five
| twenties).
| kubav wrote:
| German swapped numbers are also possible and correct in Czech
| language "sto sedmdesat pet" is the same as "sto
| petasedmdesat".
| vetinari wrote:
| Yes, but it sounds archaic, if you use the swapped version.
| kubav wrote:
| It is archaic but not in all contexts. i.e. If you talk
| about 125 ccm motrbike, it is always "german" way. Also
| it is used for human age or dates.
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| Uh, it does not (unless you're 12 or so, I suppose).
| vetinari wrote:
| Slightly older... older enough, that I remember Vlasta
| Burian's movies being aired in the tv, where it would
| fit.
| yread wrote:
| I use it basically just for tram and bus numbers. It's
| more fun to say you're taking the dvaadvacitka instead of
| dvacetdvojka.
| krab wrote:
| In Czech, both variants are possible. The German one is less
| frequent, though.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Fortunately nobody's going to use the reverse variant when
| dictating phone numbers.
| jesprenj wrote:
| Stupid is debatable here. Computer processors also sometimes
| tend to use little endian numbers instead of big endian
| numbers. Germans and us Slovenians just seem to prefer
| attention to detail and put the most significant digit of a
| two digit number on the second place.
|
| ZRC-SAZU might have some etymologycal answers.
|
| On that note I notice that I usually misspell two digit
| numbers in Slovene. For example when writing a number, I
| usually write the right digit before the left when writing
| from dictation. Sometimes when I am thinking about a number I
| tend to say it the other way around, petindevetdeset instead
| of devetinpetdeset, even though I am a native speaker.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying "it's ten for
| half five" means it's 4:20. (I think?) I'm really not sure I'll
| ever have a solid understanding.
|
| Why can't we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around
| them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time
| the Dutch will win every time.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| There are so many ways to say this in German and we mix it
| all the time, though some ways are more prevalent in certain
| areas. I'm leaving out the 'regular' version of just saying
| the numbers and such and there's also the fact that depending
| on situation (or how you feel that very second) you'll just
| say 4:20 or 16:20. 4:05: 5 past 4
| 4:10: ten past 4 4:15: quarter past 4 4:15:
| quarter 5 4:20: ten to half 5 4:20: 20 past 4
| 4:30: half 5 4:35: 5 past half 5 4:40: 10
| past half 5 4:40: 20 to 5 4:45: quarter to 5
| 4:45: 3 quarters 5 4:50: ten to 5 5:00:
| "full"
|
| I'm sure I missed some from parts of Germany I've never lived
| in/been to.
|
| Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a
| question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the
| full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um".
| Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not
| important or implied by context, which you can't do if you
| just say the numbers.
|
| EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to
| say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead
| uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or
| "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".
| Merem wrote:
| In some regions it's (4:15) "Viertel nach vier" while it's
| also "Viertel funf" because 4:45 is "Dreiviertel funf",
| while in those some regions it's then "Viertel vor funf".
|
| (Personally, I only use Viertel, halb and Dreiviertel,
| otherwise it's just "siebzehn Uhr zehn" or something.)
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I used an English "translation" instead of the German
| words for the audience here to understand better. What
| you mention is true and part of my list already e.g.
| 4:15: quarter 5 = Viertel fuenf
| phil294 wrote:
| 4:30: half 5
|
| Note that to an English-speaking person, this is wrong, as
| "half 5" means 5:30. I once tried to explain that logic to
| a few Brits, in that the German "half 5" means "half [of
| the hour from 4 to] 5" instead of "half [past] 5", but to
| no avail.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Well this happens if you try to show what Germans say in
| another language ;)
|
| So "halb fuenf" is "half 5".
|
| Same with the "full" for "voll" and for "um" I gave up.
| No idea how to say that "in English". Or for that matter
| "4 Uhr 5" for 4:05. "4 o'clock 5" doesn't quite do it,
| though I guess it's the closest one might come lol!
| davedx wrote:
| Dutch is my second language, my kids are Dutch, but they
| still sometimes struggle with the time.
|
| "Tien voor half vijf" (ten before half five) is indeed 4:20.
|
| "Tien over half vijf" (ten after half five) is 4:40.
|
| Then when it's 4:45, it's "kwart voor vijf" (quarter before
| five).
|
| I always have to think about it before I say it.
| jerrre wrote:
| I'd translate it as ten _before_ half five, but apart from
| that, yeah that 's 4:20 (inclusive or 16:20).
|
| I think in the UK they use half five as 5:30? Half past five
| basically. In NL it's half way towards five, maybe the Dutch
| are forward looking?
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has
| "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were
| once written out in English the same way they are in German.
|
| I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which
| consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
| Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her
| purifying three and thirty days ... Genesis 11.16:
| And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
| Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
|
| What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by
| Charles Dickens, we still find: About five-
| and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we
| went in ..." 'Six-and-thirty years ago, this day,
| my dear,' said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, 'I
| was married.
| chabad360 wrote:
| IIRC, the original Hebrew also writes most numbers this way.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| I was at school in the north of England (Yorkshire) in the
| late 1970s/early 80s and there were a few schoolteachers, and
| some old folks, who still spoke this way.
| switch007 wrote:
| My grandmother occasionally spoke like that too (not
| Yorkshire)
|
| I couldn't figure out why she said it backwards
| occasionally
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Beat me to the blackbirds, but could it have a French source?
|
| I guess America didn't go with "Seven and four score years
| ago..." though
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and
| not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much
| prefer English, it is much more logical.
|
| German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers
| into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely
| normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".
|
| Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also
| normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern
| English.
| nathias wrote:
| Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?
|
| We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine
| anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual
| digits for large numbers in any language.
| chrizel wrote:
| > Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like
| dyslexia?
|
| Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it
| or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this
| way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is
| normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain
| activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software
| developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems.
| And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more
| logical the way it is in English or other languages.
|
| Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021)
| and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this
| is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later
| with all its advantages.
| nathias wrote:
| Ok, so in a CS sense, why would prepending be better than
| appending for numbers? If there is a difference (imo there
| isn't because of the way we chunk thinking), but for
| counting appending is probably better as the significant
| part is first and non significant last? Same with dates,
| isn't it better to see the more significant info upfront?
| You are more likely to be confused about which day it is
| than which month, and about which month than which year it
| is.
| slightwinder wrote:
| ISO-date-format is only better for sorting. But for
| writting, the german format is far better, because it's
| written in order of priority and optionality. This is of
| course less relevant with computers today, but even for
| reading it still applys.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I do wonder why you care about optionality and priority
| and what those even mean and how it's better in any way.
| I don't think it's better at all. It's different.
|
| You remind me of a website I found way back for "learning
| French as a German". The site was actually pretty decent.
| But then it started teaching you the numbers and the
| clock and it started off with how the French way of
| saying numbers and the time is so much more logical and
| better than the German way. I closed the site immediately
| and never opened it again and I did not continue learning
| French at that time. Stopped right then and there.
|
| Priority and optionality do not help with parsing written
| dates in an internationalized context. And that is true
| before computers as well.
|
| 2021-02-03 is easy to parse as the 3rd of February 2021
| because there's no country on earth that uses this date
| format to mean the 2nd of March 2021, otherwise it
| wouldn't help at all.
|
| I'd say that they both depend on context. Let's imagine
| the two of us are talking about "going camping this
| month". Year and month are optional. If we're talking
| about "going camping later this year" the year and day
| are optional "let's go in February". Let's say we're
| trying to figure out whether to "still go camping this
| year or next year". Now day and month are optional.
| filoeleven wrote:
| Your last paragraph is a strong argument for the American
| system of month/day/year. Days lose most of their
| relevance unless they are in the current month, so month-
| first is much more logical and better, because it gives
| the mind the necessary accuracy without the useless
| precision. And furthermore...
|
| Just kidding. Month-first is as crazy as camping in
| February. I'm only used to it because I'm American.
| Getting us to switch to day/month/year seems more
| confusing than switching to year-month-day, because the
| latter is different enough to remove all ambiguity when
| reading. 06/08/2021 could be June 8 or August 6, but
| 2021-08-06 is clear since (to my knowledge) no one has
| ever used "year/day/month."
|
| As you say, this all really applies to full written dates
| only, since conversation relies much more on context
| anyway. You are forgiven if you stopped reading this
| comment before now :)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only
| speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-
| digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still
| traumatized growing up with this problem.
| varispeed wrote:
| When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn.
| I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the
| teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of
| explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these
| things I never got to learn this language, my brain just
| refused to memorise these rules :/
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has
| "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote
| out numbers the same was German does.
|
| The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers
| in this way, e.g.
|
| Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her
| purifying three and thirty days ...
|
| Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat
| Peleg ...
|
| Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
|
| What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles
| Dickens, we find:
|
| "About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their
| books when we went in ..."
| otagekki wrote:
| Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have
| people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation,
| although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I
| remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But
| IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French
| instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current
| that it's totally understandable in a way.
| FredPret wrote:
| Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like
| that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to
| 20, and then start saying "one", "two", until I get to thirty
| to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word
| for 21, 22, etc is "one-twenty", "two-twenty", etc, rather than
| "twenty-one" etc.
| lodovic wrote:
| But it's the same in English up until the number 20. 16 for
| example, six-ten. The English just count differently after
| 20. But I could imagine "four and seventy" for example.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You can do this in English or many other languages too if you
| want to.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works
| like that too._
|
| Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system,
| but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when
| someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social
| security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone
| and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since
| you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's
| actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get
| easily mixed up.
|
| Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over
| the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and
| fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is
| difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of
| writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own
| language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness
| with the other party before the dictation starts.
|
| So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this
| system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is
| actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you
| can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only
| works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the
| cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you
| wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them
| down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups
| in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from
| hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs
| quickly.
|
| Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to
| dictate it digit by digit and call it a day.
|
| So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work
| well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of
| something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over
| the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more
| problems than it solves.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| >since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but
| that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so
| numbers get easily mixed up
|
| Somewhat reminds me of typical hexdump representation,
| where even if data has little-endian bytes, nibbles inside
| each byte are still ordered big-endian.
| FredPret wrote:
| Sounds like you just have to get used to the endianness.
| It's actually more consistent; in English, you say four-
| teen but also twenty-four. In German, they picked the way
| that is most logical for counting, and stuck with it
| throughout.
| mc32 wrote:
| We say 'fourteen' but not 'four and ten'. Fourteen comes
| out as one word, like eleven. If 'fiveforty' were a word
| it would be easier to process as one word instead of five
| and forty which tends to be processed as two words.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Vierzehn and Vierundfunfzig are single words in German,
| but separate words in English. "Fourteen" (four and ten)
| being a single word is actually strange in English
| because the language normally splits words like these.
|
| English has decided to use single words up to 20. Other
| European languages stop at 100. Both are arbitrary and
| right or wrong in their own way.
|
| The English word would be "five and forty" because
| "fiveforty" would probably mean 200 going by traditional
| English (in the same say "four score and seven" means
| 4*20+7, not 24+7).
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It's actually more consistent_
|
| In theory, yes, yet my adult brain cannot process
| correctly decoding this reversed order quickly, under
| pressure, over the phone in writing, even though I
| learned to be fluent in German. I guess you have to grow
| up with this system so it imprints on your subconscious
| from an early age, else, if you grow up with another
| system, and need to switch later in life, it's game over.
|
| Learning this number system is easy, but under pressure
| over the phone, this reverse pair system falls apart
| quickly as you tend to write the first digit you hear
| instead of waiting for the full pair, which is why it's
| not used in military/critical radio transmissions,
| because it opens the gates to many errors and proves the
| system is broken for anything else than casual private
| use.
| wheels wrote:
| I can say that struggle is not universal: I learned
| German as an adult, and don't struggle with writing down
| numbers I hear spoken. In fact, I'd never even thought
| about it being hard.
|
| Every once in a while I say a number backwards (like once
| or twice a year), but I usually catch myself half-way
| after spitting it out.
| FredPret wrote:
| The system is not broken. It works for tens of millions
| of people, including over the phone. You're just not
| wired for it. Welcome to living in your second language!
|
| I will say that even an adult brain can adapt to foreign
| ways. It does get easier, though in the process you lose
| something of your original language.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| In case you're not aware, your comments come off a bit
| condescending.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It works for tens of millions of people, including
| over the phone._
|
| Except it doesn't work well, as proved by the fact that
| this system is not used in the military since even top
| comment in this thread where a German agrees that even he
| gets confused by numbers in pairs over the telephone and
| as proven by the fact that Norway transitioned from the
| _" German"_ way to the _" English"_ way precisely to fix
| this issue.
|
| I see you're very defensive about your culture/way of
| doing things, but just because some linguistical quirks
| exist to date in some languages, is in no way poof that
| they are good or that it works well, it's just proof that
| inertia is very strong as these issues get grandfathered
| in over time since transitioning to something better is
| too expensive for entire countries to make (look at why
| the imperial system is still used even though it's
| inferior to metric).
|
| And for some countries/cultures, introducing certain
| linguistical quirks on purpose and keeping them was, and
| still is, a matter of national pride and differentiation
| between their culture and other very similar cultures
| (see French vs Belgian French vs Canadian French vs Swiss
| French, or German vs Austrian German vs Swiss German), so
| changing something for the better would be admitting
| something was wrong all along in their culture and would
| definitely face backlash from conservatives and purists,
| though Norway did the change successfully from the
| "German" way to the "English" way of speaking pairs of
| numbers in order to fix the confusion issues I mentioned.
| lowdose wrote:
| In Dutch it is the same way. We even have another word for
| billion. Billion in dutch means 1000x more than the English
| version. Compounding is translated as combined interest.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| English has million and milliard [0], but American English
| preferred the short scale and that has had more influence
| over the language. The UK only officially switched over to
| the "American" system in 1974.
|
| Many European languages have the long scale, English is the
| odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still
| classify that as a European language.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale
| tgv wrote:
| > If I have to dictate phone numbers
|
| The problem also exists in English:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s
| logifail wrote:
| > German here... I hate how we say numbers
|
| We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework
| can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows
| the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying
| "64" says "46" (or vice versa).
|
| Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English]
| "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me:
| "Umm...."
| jeroenhd wrote:
| As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards"
| as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345)
| and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty
| four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then
| there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the
| second time.
|
| English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still
| follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West
| European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike
| English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in
| the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning
| 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American
| system also switched to the short system (million, billion,
| trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English
| has made the same switch relatively recently but only because
| of American influences.
|
| I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying
| numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it
| "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.
|
| I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but
| forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and
| probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language
| changes by itself.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| >As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers
| "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone
| number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently
| (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the
| same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the
| exact same error the second time.
|
| I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It forces you to stop and parse the numbers because you
| need to invert them in your head. For me, it's the same
| effect as writing something down because your brain needs
| to process it.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| But I mean in English you do this exactly as shown
|
| > You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then
| verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four,
| five)
|
| So how does it change?
| umpalumpaaa wrote:
| But isn't using the "zwanzigeins" notation prone to error as
| well?
|
| Zwanzigeins could mean 20 1 or 21. The only thing that
| differentiates "20 1" from "21" is the duration of the delay
| between 20 and 1...
| VortexDream wrote:
| Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a
| sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the
| rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.
| kriro wrote:
| I find it more curious that the languages I know best tend to
| have special words for 11 and 12 that don't follow the same logic
| as the rest. Eleven and twelve instead of one-teen, two-teen or
| something. And that even leads to things like a teenager being
| age 13+. In German it's the same elf + zwolf and then it
| continues with dreizehn, vierzehn etc. My guess is that it is
| somehow related to the fact that a dozen is a thing but I'm
| curious where it comes from. In French it goes all the way up to
| 16 (onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize) before we end
| up with dix-sept for 17. French has always been the most peculiar
| to me as there's stuff like 82 being quatre-vingt-deux (4*20+12).
| And then there's languages like Vietnamese that happily start
| with 10+1 from the get go (muoi mot, muoi hai, muoi ba).
| Fascinating stuff :)
| sva_ wrote:
| I was curious and found this rationalisation:
| https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76007/why-it-eleven-twel...
|
| It's pretty hand-wavey but still interesting speculation.
| nkurz wrote:
| I was mystified by the parenthetical in one of the answers:
| (Please note that "hundred" once meant 120.)
|
| Seemed unlikely, apparently the ground truth has moved more
| through the ages than I expected. Lo, the "long hundred":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_hundred.
| barosl wrote:
| After reading the answer, I've got some questions:
|
| 1. I like little-endian systems because adding or subtracting
| small numbers is easier in those systems byte-wise. Would the
| same benefit apply to human languages?
|
| 2. Why did the Arabic numeral system choose big-endian in the
| first place? It could easily have been little-endian, even
| including zeroes, likes 001 meaning one hundred. Who made the
| choice?
| sdefresne wrote:
| Arabic is written left to right, so aren't the number little-
| endian in their Arabic form ?
| majewsky wrote:
| I was going to correct your mistake, but then I understood
| that you just wrote "right to left" right-to-left.
| sdefresne wrote:
| Ooops. Yes, I meant right to left. Not enough karma to edit
| and fix my mistake. Thank you.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Not sure about Arabic, but in Hebrew numbers are written from
| left to right.
| tomNth wrote:
| In arabic numerals , but in hebrew numerals (a alphabetic
| numeral system) its right to left.
| amelius wrote:
| I prefer big-endian systems because you more quickly get an
| idea about the magnitude of a number as the bits come in.
| [deleted]
| emsy wrote:
| > The question, why German numbers are "backwards" is naive in
| many ways.
|
| What a terrible way to start an answer.
| Bud wrote:
| As the comments point out, our counting system in English does
| precisely the same sort of thing, often: thirteen, fourteen,
| fifteen, sixteen, etc., all name the ones digit before the tens.
| And because of logic and ease of counting relatively small
| numbers of things. You can tell this is the reason since, once
| you get over 20, all this reverses: twenty-three, twenty-four,
| twenty-five, etc.
|
| It's the same pattern in French. Under 20: douze, treize,
| quatorze, quinze. Over 20: vingt et un, vingt-deux, vingt-trois,
| vingt-quatre, etc.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| So do eleven ("one left over") and twelve ("two left"), with a
| bit of stretch.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/eleven
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/twelve
| gpderetta wrote:
| For some reason Italian flips at 17: sedici (16, six-ten),
| diciassette (17, ten-seven).
| [deleted]
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I think many English speakers would admit 11 through 19 are a
| bit of a weird case. It would probably make more sense if we
| went ten, oney-one, oney-two, etc. I imagine most English
| people subconsciously treat 13-19 as individually named as 0-12
| are, rather than comprehending them as a composition of two
| numbers as 20-99 are.
|
| That said, based on the other commenters here, the mixed endian
| nature of German counting seems very strange to me, being able
| to generally read numbers the same way they're serialised on
| paper seems useful.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I am wondering why the English have it only backwards for the
| numbers 13 to 19.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Try French... 95? Quatre vingt quinze. That's four times twenty
| fifteen.
|
| German at least makes some kind of sense.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It is because little endian-ness in speech allowed market makers
| to trade faster. If you have a commodity that's trading at around
| 24 or 25, there's no point in waiting to hear about the 20, you
| just care about the 4 or the 5. This allowed the HFTs of the old
| world to trade super fast and the rest of society adopted it as a
| result.
|
| Just kidding.
|
| Number systems in different languages get pretty weird. I still
| have people asking my why in Danish, 50 (halvtreds), 70
| (halvfjerds), and 90 (halvfems) seem to have the word "half" in
| them, and it's half of 60 (tres) or 80 (firs) but not 100. The
| reason is the number system in the top half of the hundreds
| actually counts in 20s (snes) but that old word is basically
| never used anymore. So 70 is half a 20 to having four 20s, which
| got shortened (fire snes -> firs). Similarly 90 is half of a snes
| towards 5 20s, which we prefer to call a hundred.
|
| There is some hope though. Swedish and Norwegian are reformed,
| despite also being closely related to German.
|
| I did read a popsci piece about the effect on numbers on kids
| learning times tables. Chinese numbering seems much more
| sensible. 15 is just ten-five, 52 is just five-ten-two
| (Vietnamese as well). In that way perhaps it directly encodes the
| place value system that kids need to learn, whereas naming it
| "two and half of the score on the way to the third" is just
| confusing. Personally I sometimes do times tables in Cantonese,
| it seems to recall a lot faster than doing it in English and
| certainly Danish. If you think about it, the ten in the middle is
| just a constant, so you are only remembering two sounds. Also
| there's no converting between the tens version of the number
| (fifty) and five. The whole table is just combinations of the
| basic 1-9, with nothing in the units if it's divisible by 10.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The Danish case (at least for 50) was explained by Tom Scott in
| a numberphile video, I believe. https://youtu.be/l4bmZ1gRqCc
| starting around the two minute mark.
|
| The half in the Danish 50 is derived from an abbreviation of an
| abbreviation, originating from "half away from three, times
| twenty" ((3-1/2) _20 = 21/2_ 20 = 50) using some nice, outdated
| numbering orders. He doesn't talk about 70 and 90, but your
| explanation makes sense. That would mean there are two ways the
| "half" made it into the names for tens!
| Havoc wrote:
| To make my school life miserable. We switched language of
| instruction for maths and science between them at various grades
| ginko wrote:
| Interestingly Norwegian used to spell out numbers in the same
| order as German, but reformed this in the 1950s when telephone
| numbers became widespread:
|
| https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_nye_tellem%C3%A5ten
|
| I guess having a dedicated Sprakradet to oversee the development
| of the Norwegian language and a single broadcasting service(NRK)
| made the roll-out of this possible.
| davidkunz wrote:
| Reminds me of an episode of "King of Queens" when Arthur
| dictates a phone number: https://youtu.be/e_B40_WXDoQ
|
| In German, it's even funnier because of the 'wrong order':
| https://youtu.be/gjPmUUCdLHw (hats off to the translators!)
| xlance wrote:
| There are still plenty of people using the old way, young and
| old.
|
| I would say I use the old way in all situations except when I
| read out phonenumbers.
| hbarka wrote:
| Taken to its extreme, numbers would be orally expressed in binary
| digits or pick your base-n!
| danans wrote:
| > There are many more languages that speak or read (some of)
| their numbers "backwards", among them Greek, Latin (both
| directions possible), Celtic languages etc., and of course
| languages that actually read right to left like Arabic, where our
| written numbers come from
|
| Ironically, in Arabic numbers are written left to right, just
| like in the west, reflecting that they were borrowed from India,
| whose indigenous writing systems are also ltr. It goes to show
| that not only is there not a "correct" order to express numbers,
| but the spoken order need not reflect the written order.
| j7ake wrote:
| Historically english also spoke numbers in the same way as in
| German. For example "four and twenty blackbirds".
| dfawcus wrote:
| As in the nursery rhyme:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
|
| That form of counting is still understood, recognised, but
| viewed as archaic in England.
|
| I guess it got lost in the evolution of Old English to Middle
| English, and the interplay of Old Norse plus the subsequent
| influence of Norman French, all of which bashed the Germanic
| core of of English in to its modern form.
| filmor wrote:
| Numbers in multiple Sherlock Holmes books are spelled out
| this way, so that switch must have happened much more
| recently.
| ectopod wrote:
| I know elderly people who still speak this way. It's
| changed in the last hundred years.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Back when the Spanish had driven the Moors south monks were
| picking over the wonderful libraries they had left behind, one of
| the treasures they discovered was what we now call arabic numbers
| - but they screwed up, they took the numbers as they saw them
| whole into their writing system. They took numbers meant to be
| written in a right to left writing system into a left to right
| system without reversing them.
|
| Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in
| business - when you add numbers together the result can be
| written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space
| for the answer to fit into.
|
| But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the
| cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness -
| took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the
| original arabic way of doing it was right
| jefftk wrote:
| On the other hand, network byte order is big endian, so now we
| typically have a little endian devices converting to and from
| big endian to talk to each other.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Yes, we're stuck with that, at least for old protocols
| Zak wrote:
| Counterpoint: when talking or skimming text, the exact number
| is often not especially important to most of the audience, but
| the most significant digit or two are.
|
| If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not
| going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm
| not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the
| 20.
|
| Are you skipping because bicycles are SUPER popular during
| the pandemic and you don't want to fit into the crowd?
| nailuj wrote:
| To know the magnitude of the most significant digit, you have
| to scan the whole number anyways. Looking for this info at
| the end of the number would be just as natural if you were
| used to it.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Yes, number representation should be floating point with
| the magnitude written at the front.
| tux1968 wrote:
| I know it's an irrational pet peeve, but i'd be happy if the
| German's (and others) would just stop using comma as decimal
| point.
| beefield wrote:
| I'd be happy to compromise so that Europeans ban decimal comma
| and Americans start using metric system.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| At the international meridian conference of 1884, the French
| allowed the resolution for using the Greenwich meridian[1] to
| go through on the condition that another resolution promoting
| the use of the metric (or 'decimal') system (including
| decimal time!) also went through.
|
| [1] or as the French called it, "Paris mean time, retarded by
| 9 minutes and 21 seconds"
| raverbashing wrote:
| To me is a bit weird, since I learned it that way.
|
| But the dot as decimal point also makes sense.
|
| Now, using comma as a thousands separator? Nuh-huh. Doesn't
| make any sense to me
|
| 2'000? Fine. 2_000? Fine. 2,000? It's just awful
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, it's a bit naive to ask "why they were initially conceived
| backwards"
|
| But why it remains as such is just anachronistic ;) English
| inverted them back, so it is consistent with the rest of the >
| 100 numbers. (ok, the 0-20 range has exceptions in many
| languages, so it's fine)
| qayxc wrote:
| > (ok, the 0-20 range has exceptions in many languages, so it's
| fine)
|
| (ok, the 0-99 has exceptions in many languages, so it's fine)
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| "Why are numbers "backwards"?? What a naive question! So
| ignorant! What's backwards to you is forwards to somebody else!
| Anyway, when Germans studied numerals they decided to write them
| backwards in keeping with their written text"
| freeflight wrote:
| Tbh, as a German I never really noticed this.
|
| Thinking it trough, it also makes me wonder why it ain't
| consistent and breaks down after more than two digits? 21 is
| einundzwangig, but 121 is _einhundert_ einundzwanzig, 1121 is
| _eintausendeinhundert_ einundzwanzig, and so on. So there it's
| not really backwards anymore.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| But once you're at tens of thousands, it rears its ugly head
| again, _einundzwanzigtausend_.
| laurensr wrote:
| It's the same in Dutch... But French is even weirder : 96 becomes
| four-twenty sixteen...
| 3np wrote:
| Danish is the worst.. "six half-fives" (6 + (5 - 1/2)*20)
| rvense wrote:
| This is just the etymology. These words are just words, both
| in Danish and French. It's not like speakers of that language
| do the maths before saying it.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Used to be like that in Norway. Some older people will still say
| "two-and-forty", "eight-and-seventy", instead of "forty-two",
| "seventy-eight", etc.
|
| In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things
| - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching
| centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would
| decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day
| you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.
|
| This change was called "The new counting method", and describes
| how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.
| qayxc wrote:
| Sound a bit inconsistent - why weren't 10 - 20 also changed?
| Would have been great to have a language that's consistent all
| the way through as far as counting is concerned :)
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I have nowhere enough knowledge in linguistics to properly
| explain this, but numbers between 10 and 20 have their own
| unique pronouncement which sound quite incorrect if inverted.
| Not too different from English, 10,11,12 have their own
| endings, while 13 to 19 end with a "ten" - similar to the
| English "teen". But saying "three-and-ten","four-and-ten"
| etc. doesn't sound right at all, in our language.
|
| It's after this that you get "twenty-one, twenty-two, ... "
| and up to "ninety-nine" - which can also be pronounced "one-
| and-twenty, two-and-twenty, ..." up to "nine-and-ninety".
| everydayDonut wrote:
| I wish we just said 'ten-four' etc. instead of 'fourteen'
| which sounds almost exactly like 'fourty'. Especially over
| the phone someone could easily mistake one for the other
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| Fun fact: Hungarian doesn't have special names for the
| numbers 11-19.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| If you think German numbers are strange ... don't even look at
| French that require multiplication and addition. Four-twenty-ten-
| seven? ... yup, you guessed it 97.
| nanis wrote:
| https://jose-lesson.com/lin/2017/01/16/nonaginta-septem/
| rvense wrote:
| That's just the etymology. It's a word. French speakers aren't
| multiplying in their heads...
| woutr_be wrote:
| My native language is Dutch, but I've been living in an English
| speaking country for almost 10 years now. It's annoying to having
| to change my mindset whenever I visit friends and family in my
| native country.
|
| In Belgium, we say 25 as "five and twenty" (same as German),
| which makes sense, but if you've been saying "twenty-five" for 10
| years, it does throw you off.
| WJW wrote:
| Not to mention that "half five" means 17:30 in most English
| speaking countries but 16:30 in Dutch.
| Delk wrote:
| I've personally opted to never use the expression "half five"
| in English because it seems able to cause any amount of
| confusion and misunderstanding among people from different
| linguistic backgrounds.
| jefftk wrote:
| In the US, I don't think most people would know what to make
| of "half five".
|
| (I bet something like 20% of people would think hard and then
| decide you meant 2:30)
| [deleted]
| BruceEel wrote:
| and let's not forget our masterpiece "ten to half five", one
| of the most straightforwardly intuitive ways of saying
| "16:20"...
| woutr_be wrote:
| I have noticed that I somewhat simplified my vocabulary in
| that regard, previously I would say "half five", but now I
| just go with "four thirty".
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I's ambiguous in British English, at least it used to be.
| Half five can be short for either half of five (4:30) or half
| past five (5:30).
| barrucadu wrote:
| Really? Where in Britain would that be ambiguous? I've
| grown up here and I've _never_ heard someone say "half X"
| to mean "half an hour to X".
| mudita wrote:
| In some dialects of German they go even further, using
| "quarter five" for "16:15" and "three quarter five" for
| "16:45".
| jeroenhd wrote:
| At least that makes sense, telling time in Dutch switches
| orientation halfway through the hour, towards the closest
| half hour. German does the same thing, I believe.
|
| "five past five" is 5:05, then of course "ten past five"
| and "quarter part five". Then comes "ten to half six" which
| would be 5:20. Then half six, ten past half six, quarter to
| six, ten to six and five to six.
|
| It's interesting to see how Dutch and German time telling
| is clearly oriented at half hours while English is oriented
| at whole hours.
|
| Now that the world is ruled by digital clocks, many people
| will just use digital (24 hour) time. "Eighteen hour four"
| would be the current time in this notation, which is a lot
| simpler. It's funny how the tool we use to tell time
| dictates the way we pronounce things!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'm American and I wouldn't know what to make of "half five"
| in English (I speak some German and it's the same as Dutch
| there). To say 17:30 you'd say "half past five".
| BruceEel wrote:
| Netherlands calling. Same problem over here. Perhaps I would find
| inversion a little bit less annoying if it were at least applied
| consistently but no "123" = "one-hundred-three-and-twenty"!
| gizdan wrote:
| My parents emigrated to the Netherlands when I was young. In my
| native tongue we say numbers in the same way as they do in
| English. My 8 year-old brain struggled to understand this new
| way saying numbers when I started school in the Netherlands. I
| got there in the end but I recall it feeling like it took
| forever.
| ezconnect wrote:
| It's not weird, the problem is you learned to communicate in
| English and learned another way of vocalizing numbers.
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