And the French way isn’t rotten? Lmao
It’s bad, but not danish bad
French is pretty stupid too. Smart Belgium with french as national tongue only changed that number aberration: They use the made-up word “octante” for eighty and “nonante” for ninety, instead of “quatre-ving” (four-twenty) or “quatre vingt dix” (four-twenty , ten) in proper french
In Belgium we use nonante, not octante, that is, iirc only used in Switzerland. That means we at least don’t use quatre-vingt onze etc.
oh my bad… so they went “septante” “nonante” and kept the “quatre vingt” in the middle… this is more weird
Dunno, I prefer french to spanish tbh. Maybe its because basque is like French.
What if I told you that all words are made up?
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie…
That still fits the pattern of “bigger number, then smaller number.”
True. It does match the French pattern of 4x20+x.
It does exactly, and I didn’t notice that. “Four score and twelve.”
I’m German and our way of counting is genuinely stupid. 121 would translate to “onehundred one and twenty”. You’d think it’s just a matter of practice but errors related to mixing up digits are statistically more common in German speaking regions. Awesome when it comes to stuff like calculating medication dosages and such. Like it’s not a huge issue but it’s such an unneccessary layer of confusion.
Funny thing: it is the correct way to count like that, also in english. Four-teen, eight-teen etc. They just turn that around beginning with twenty. How obscure is that shit, when you really think about it?
Its so annoying with phone numbers as well, depending how someone pronounces is. My mom always says phone numbers in 2 digits, like 06 12 34 56 78 (06 twelve fourandthirty sixandfifty eightandseventy) and you just get confused because you want to type in the first number pronounced
Phone numbers should always be said by individual digits, makes it simpler and faster to type as you’re listening
Absolutely agreed
In some languages, pairs work fine.
Surprisingly, even English does it correctly
except 13-19 at least
I’m bilingual and switch back and forth a lot between languages when I’m not home. As such I often mess this up half way through calculating something.
As a non-native working in German, the numbers are one of the trickiest parts.
My jobs generally involve a lot of math and discussions of numbers, and I often struggle with swapping numbers around in my head. Especially because when you get to bigger numbers people often switch between (or use a combination of) listing individual digits left-to-right and saying multi-digit numbers.
The though is when you occasionally notice natives mess it up!
My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that’s because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those “nastier” blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.
Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: “two thousand, five hundred and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable (i.e. “two thousand” + “five hundred” + “two and ninenty”), whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of just memorizing 100 numerical language expressions we had to do it with 1000 or more.
(If you’re not a French native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting “quatre-vingt” as “four twenty” to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)
Yes! I’m German and I hate it. It’s also very inconvenient when entering numbers into a spreadsheet or something, because you have to know the whole number before you can start typing it.
The older generation in Norway also uses that format. I usually tell them that we aren’t under German occupation anymore, so they should use the sensible format.
It just feels weird saying it the other way tho
Based and logic pilled
Bit of a sidenote.
Are the English numbers 11-20 influencer by the base 20 system of french back when we had French speaking royalty? And for some reason they’re the only unique “digits” for lack of a better term that survived because once we get to twenty it’s a pure base 10 system with a consistent pattern throughout.
I’m hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can tell me if my thinking is correct or not.
Edit: thanks for the history lessons, were interesting to read through.
No, 1-12 are influenced by the old base 12 Germanic/Norse system, which is why -teen starts at thirteen, same as in German (11: elf, 12: zwölf, 13: dreizehn, 14: vierzehn & so on)… The -teen for 1x in english is also a carryover from this, being threeten, fourten, fiveten etc. with only numbers over 20 having their orders reversed - German has something similar with “und” only appearing in numbers over 20. English did historically too, eg. “four and twenty blackbirds”.
Base 20 was historically used for large numbers though, eg “four score and seven years” by Abraham Lincoln, which was a poetic way of saying 87 inspired from Psalms 90:10, which says “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” in the King James Version, which reflects that using base 20 for large numbers (and not just 80) was not uncommon in the 17th century.
Seems like they’re not, although I get your thought process. If we take Old English (which was English before the Norman conquest) and modern Swedish (since Sweden was never conquered by anyone from France or the Romans) as comparisons, we have
Eleven: OE endleofan, Swedish elva Twelve: OE twelf, Swedish tolv Thirteen: OE threotiene, Swedish tretton Fourteen: OE feowertiene, Swedish fjortun
I think you can see the pattern. These actually all have similar common ancestors going into Proto-Germanic, so they’re way older than the French influence on English.
Since other Indo-European languages like German and Russian do the same thing as English where the line between “one word numbers” and “two word numbers” is 20 to 21, I suspect that originates waaaaay back in the history of these languages
I’m actually impressed by this map. The French speaking part of Switzerland is not only differentiated from the German speaking part, it is also differently coloured than France, since Swiss French has more sensible numbers.
That’s four goddamn numbers in a row!
Ugh okay here’s another “Danes shouldn’t be allowed to make number stuff”:
The time 15:25 is “five minutes before half 4”
“Fem minutter i halv fire”
So you round up to 16 before even halfway, what!?
I’m very Danish and refuse to adhere to this nonsense. It’s pronounced “three twenty-five”.
Jeg elsker dig for det
Same in Dutch,
“Vijf voor half vier”
Yeah the Dutch way of saying time is also messed up, I still have to think about it for a moment every time.
That makes perfect sense to me though. In Swedish we’d say fem i halv fyra. Five minutes to half four.
But in English half four would be short for half past four. I guess.
Counting like the Danish, however, that is an abomination.
Man 3:25 is right there
What’s wrong with “25 over 3?” I see the need for half 4 by itself but things being relative to that is so weird to me
Well, it’s interesting because that would be the case with 15:20. That’d be tjugo över tre (twenty past three). But specifically 15:25 would be fem i halv fyra (five to half four). 15:35 is fem över halv fyra (five past half four).
And then 15:40 is tjugo i fyra (twenty to four).
So :25 and :35 are weird edge cases.
Agree - even “3 25” would be perfectly normal.
You can say the same in Poland. “Za pięć w pół do czwartej.”
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They must have meant 9*10+2 for most of the countries. For French and Danish you would just remember the word for 90 instead of using logic to get there so they are actually quite 90+2.
So do you mean to suggest “quatre-vingt-dix” just means 90 and doesn’t also mean “four-twenty-ten”?
Well quatre-vignt-dix is literally translated to “four twenty ten” (why not just nine ten? because historically french evolved with a base 20 counting system).
But when a french person hears that, they don’t hear those numbers, to them it just means ninety.
Just like an english person won’t hear. “four-ty”, and think “four-ten” “oh that’s 40”. Because “fourty” was originally “four-ten” (written differently because old english so I rewrote in modern for simplicity) and got shortened down.
To them “fourty” is just a word that means 40. Just like to metropolitan french people “ quatre-vignt-dix” is just a word that means 90.
You’re right. Only Denmark deserves 2+90.
And the Germans
Don’t they do 2+9*10?
I probably misunderstood what you meant in your comment - I was just focusing on 2 before 90.
But yes, they do say 2 and 9 10 (2 + 9*10)
Quatre-vingt douze isn’t incredibly onerous when you use it in practice.
Yeah France is fine
hard agree i actually think france’s method of counting is pretty intuitive
Agreed. Fourscore and twelve just works (English used to use this, at least in formal speech and writing).
Quatre-vingt dix huit or quatre-vingt dix neuf are definitely more of a mouthful and illustrate the point better.
Ehh, i’m not giving France a pass either.
The answer to 100 - 8 should not be four twenties and a twelve. We’re counting, not making change.
French counting is bunk. Way, Way, better then Denmark though apparently
the thing nobody mentions is that the 4x20 part became a word that just means 80 in people’s mind, it kinda not literal anymore, but the Swiss and Belgian ways are still better (edit the 4x20+10 is similarly just 90)
e a word that just means 80 in people’s mind, it kinda not literal anymore, but the Swiss and Belgian ways are still better (edit the 4x20+10 is s
And if it was 28 syllables, it would still be 80 in people’s minds. But the words are still four twenty ten eight for what could easily just be nine eight.
I get it, but it is really inefficient for something as oft used as counting.
If it makes you feel better, English is full of crap like that which doesn’t make any sense and I’ll own that as a trash language :)
Yeah that’s why i say the Belgian and Swiss ways are better, their French speakers have dedicated words for 70 80 90. That being said I not sure but I guess in a lot of languages those words just mean 7x10 8x10 9x10 … we understand base 10 better but that’s still a calculation in disguise, historically (and still in some cultures?) base 10 isn’t the norm (hence the 4x20 among others).
Most Danes does not know how 92 is constructed - it is just as picture one, second calculation: 2 and halvfems = 92.
However, I do feel like we’re using Imperial unites.
(edit the 4x20+10 is similarly just 90)
I can let you get away with the first part about 4x20 just becoming the word for 80, but with this one, you’re just fooling yourself and others.
If it were just another word for ninety, than ninety-two would be (4x20+10)+2 instead of 4x20+12 And it works that way up to 96.
Just stop making excuses and own the weirdness.
… I would say that’s more about 10 and 12 having their on words, we don’t say ten two, it’s a bit of a shortcut? Then after 16 we stopped caring and didn’t make new words, sticked to 10 7, 10 8, 10 9 for some reason, that IS weird. Unless you take into account that base 10 wasn’t always the norm and maybe it made sense to have dedicated words for numbers up to 12 or 16 because they were commonly used quantities or alternative counting bases idk. See I can find (blurry memories of, needs sources) good reasons ;p The point being people say 4 20 12 but only think 92.
I don’t think a different base explains things really well. Even though the way you guys count to 16 may point to a hexadecimal system, but then all the higher numbers would have to work entirely different. It’s at least an inconsistent mix of systems.
But of course you don’t do maths in your head and it all just boils down to words for numbers, that you simply know. That’s just how language works, and a lot of language starts to become weird, if you think about it too much. Doesn’t mean we can’t have fun teasing each other about it. ;)
I think the first picture jumps over a little bit of calculation:
9 x 10 + 2
2 + 9 x 10
p.s. The third one makes total sense!
shakes fist THE DANES!
We can also do 2+90 here in the UK. There’s a nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds” that I think the kids are still learning.
97
4x20 + 10 + 7
