[HN Gopher] Using fewer syllables to express numbers
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Using fewer syllables to express numbers
Author : adrianton3
Score : 23 points
Date : 2026-01-04 06:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thegraycuber.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (thegraycuber.github.io)
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > 773466
|
| > two hundred ten cubed twelfths plus twelve cubed minus twelve
|
| Intuitive!
| driggs wrote:
| This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the
| submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has
| utility.
|
| As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the
| pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I
| count a bar of 8 like this:
|
| > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight
|
| Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is
| especially tricky. It'd be easiest to do it in hexadecimal-style,
| but somehow I can't bring myself to count a part out as:
|
| > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, nine, a, b, c, d,
| e, f, g
|
| If only I could convince musicians to use zero-based indexing
| instead of one-based.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'd reverse the second half and count it as: one, two, three,
| four, five, six, sev, eight, eight, sev, six, five , four,
| three, two, one.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| That reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my
| "flowstate" playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat
| with polyrhythms that caught my ear. I tried counting along and
| realized the primary beat is in 7/8, and in confirming it found
| myself counting, "one, two, three, four, five, six, sen,
| one,...".
|
| 1.
| https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbK...
|
| 2.
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Given all of music's esoteric conventions and historical
| vestiges, I'm surprised they don't zero index. Octaves divided
| into thirds and fifths, who decided that was ok?
| driggs wrote:
| Oof, "zero" is two syllables so we'll have to pronounce it
| "null".
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Zed is probably fine.
| SilasX wrote:
| Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a
| proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make
| common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup:
|
| MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC
|
| There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers
| have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time
| remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to
| store the cognitive load of saying it. So native Chinese
| speakers are much better at it than Spanish.
|
| English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable
| ... except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause
| a massive amount of good, when summed over all the times people
| have to remember numbers.
|
| The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-
| compatible way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just
| commit to pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word
| as se--n), and eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation
| and codified as standard. As long as the listener is expecting
| a number there, they will automatically fill in the missing
| sounds and parse it as a 7.
|
| Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or
| sen."
|
| Who's with me?
| altairprime wrote:
| Sen's good to me!
| toast0 wrote:
| I was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I
| never had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted
| that high), it just gets two half-duration notes compared to
| the others. NBD
|
| Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's
| wrong with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we
| would did one eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision,
| but I forget the triplet division.
|
| The drummers all seemed to have a common syntax for different
| note length patterns without numbers, which you could probably
| drop in between numbered beats too.
| driggs wrote:
| Because that's for half-time!
| altairprime wrote:
| It helps to count from a as either zero or one (use "o" as zero
| then) rather than a as ten. Won't help you with hexadecimal
| compatibility if you take the former but it should overcome the
| brain obstacle, and scales up to x/26ths at least.
| IsTom wrote:
| Personally I prefer to use non-numerical word phrases
| (especially in odd meters) with the right number of syllables
| instead. If you want to you can even place accents where
| they're supposed to be with right words.
| drob518 wrote:
| If you're counting it fast, you can run things together a bit:
|
| One, two, three, four, five, six, sev, nate
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I've settled on "sen" for seven when I want it short.
|
| Zero could also do with being a monosyllable, but at least we
| have "oh" and "nil" for that.
|
| Then there are letters. 25 of them are monosyllables (though a
| few like "aitch" and "kyoo" cut it fine), then w (double you)
| is _three_ syllables, and not even _right_ , it's double vee.
|
| Unfortunately, once I mysteriously manage to right these two
| wrongs, power will go to my head, and I'll go ahead with other
| spelling reforms and abolishing a few stupid letters like c and
| x and replacing them with others for all those poor fricatives
| that have been loaded onto -h digraphs.
|
| And while all that's going on, I'll be learning Telugu better,
| and it will laugh at me with its average of 2.5 syllables per
| digit.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| In French, all numbers between 10 and 15 except 14 are
| monosyllabic! So, you just might say "dix, onze, douze" and so
| on. (Quatorze will have to become 'torze or something.)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 16 too: seize
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm having a hard time thinking of a good time signature that
| accents on a subdivision smaller than an eighth. Can you give
| an example?
|
| I also don't know any musicians that would count everything. I
| usually hear "and", "and" "uh", "ee" "and" "uh", etc. between
| the downbeats and numbers are typically used to count whole
| notes.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I got one that ended with "minus ninety halves". How is "ninety
| halves" better than "forty-five"?
| rdlw wrote:
| "Our first priority is to minimize sylliness, but I think our
| second priority should be to maximize silliness. And 'thirty
| squared twelfths' is certainly sillier."
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'd love to see this done for French numbers, and no cheating
| with huitante or nonante.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Cheating? At least it's still base-10!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| That's why it's cheating! Quatre-vingt-dix-sept is obviously
| the correct way to say 97.
| altairprime wrote:
| And fewer syllables for 970067! (I think?)
| xvilka wrote:
| Use Chinese to get the least amount of syllables.
| z2 wrote:
| Very true, worst case is 2n-1 syllables for n digits.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I tried "4765" (four syllables), and got "sixty-nine squared plus
| four" (6 syllables).
|
| The ICAO phonetic alphabet specifically pronounces "4" as
| "fouwer", and "9" as "niner", so as to increase redundancy on a
| noisy channel.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Finnish averages pretty close to 1 syllable per digit when you
| want it to.
|
| Here's a Finn counting 1, 2, 3, ... 87 (and ending in very
| Finnish way):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G57Zp7ZXYik
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