How did you guys even get to this thought process for saying this sort of thing? Why would you work in fractions for whole numbers in language to start? Is this a monarch thing like they fancied themselves a math wizard so they said it like it was a solution on countdown and others mimicked to keep them happy/sound smart themselves?
VonReposti 41 points 2 years ago
The reason is that the Danish numbering system is based on a vigesimal (base-20) system instead of the decimal system. Why is a good question but it might have been influenced by French during a time where numbers from 50-100 is less frequently used, making them prone to complexity. The fractions simply occur since you need at least one half of twenty (10) to make the change from e.g 50 to 60 in a 20-based system.
rickyrigatoni 17 points 2 years ago
ancient danes counted with their toes too lmao
VaalaVasaVarde 6 points 2 years ago
That's the technical reason, another reason is that the Danes tried to out-French the French, as they were very hip at the time.
HorreC 2 points 2 years ago
why would you avoid the fraction and use it up to 100 then minus 8. I dont have a lot of an issue with it being base 20 but the idea that talking in numbers you have to know fractions for a child is WILD to me. You have to do like a month of understanding math fractions to get how to speak whole numbers.
VonReposti 3 points 2 years ago
We don't really learn the reason, we just memorise the word for the number. Kinda like you know the word "dog" means a four legged cute creature, but not why the name is "dog". The old rules are not something we are teached, I just got curious after a confused foreigner made me think about the system for a second :p
bstix 8 points 2 years ago
English also has words like dozen (12) and score (20).
I guess it came from the physical counting in trading. Imagine counting 96 small items. It makes sense to group them into scores and then count the scores. 1 score 2 score 3 score 4 score and a half score. Then there are few remaining that didn't fit it neatly in scores and then counted last. That's a total of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 plus the 4 and a half scores.
VonReposti 3 points 2 years ago
No idea. We probably had a period where we traded a lot with the French and got influenced by the vigesimal system that way, creating the abomination of a Frankenstein monster we have today.
MisterFrog 1 point 2 years ago path: 0 15744412 15744462 15744604 15795263, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
thebestaquaman 16 points 2 years ago
Little fun-fact: We still have a trace of this left in Norwegian, where the most common way to say "1.5" is not "en og en halv" ("one and a half") but "halvannen" which roughly translates to "half second".
We abandoned the "half third", "half fourth" etc. very long ago (if we ever used them), but "halvannen" just rolls nicely off the tongue.
VonReposti 5 points 2 years ago
We actually still say "halvanden" in Danish too. Everything else is not used (except for halvfems which means 90...)
thebestaquaman 3 points 2 years ago
You also use halv tres (50) and halv firs (70) don't you?
Viking_Hippie 5 points 2 years ago
How
Why
Dane here. My guess is utter madness resulting from a history of overdosing on fly agaric filtered through the urine of slaves, followed by a distressingly long period of Catholicism.
Frankly, it's a wonder that our ancestors didn't come up with an even MORE bizarre way of saying numbers and other things!
vaultdweller013 2 points 2 years ago
Also I'm pretty sure losing folks to stupid wars in England didn't help, the Great Heathen army and the conquest of England by Sweyn Forkbeard come to mind. No the relative prosperity and peace of Cnut the Great doesn't make up for the theoretical brain drain.
Scott_of_the_Arctic 3 points 2 years ago
That's actually happened a couple of times in Denmark (accidentally and after the sketch was released) https://www.tv2.no/...
te_abstract_art 4 points 2 years ago
Oh man, that takes me back.
VonReposti 9 points 2 years ago
- Half to the five = (5-0.5) = 4.5
- "Sindstyve" = multiplied by 20
- 4.5*20
- Two and half to the five multiplied by twenty = 2+(5-0.5)*20 = 2+4.5*20 = 2+90 = 92
nickwitha_k 4 points 2 years ago
Oh! That makes my brain hurt a bit less. It's "subtract half from five".
VonReposti 3 points 2 years ago
Yeah, it's kinda the difference between saying "the clock is currently half past twelve" (the English way) and "the clock is currently half to one" (which we say in Danish and probably in a wealth of non-English languages too).
nickwitha_k 3 points 2 years ago
This is making my brain hurt. I need to try reading a few more times but, if I am understanding it correctly, the old Danish way of saying it is mathematically incorrect?
Half-to-five == 2.5
2.5*20 == 50
...
Did I read that correctly?
AdrianTheFrog 6 points 2 years ago
I think it means half less than 5, or 4.5
Maybe you'd say "half until 5" in english
TaTTe 4 points 2 years ago
I'm not Danish, but I think he meant 4.5 instead of 2.5. It's like halfway from 4 to 5, not from 0 to 5.
A similar word exists in Finnish too, when going from 1 to 2: "puolitoista" translates to "half second", like halfway to the second number, and is commonly used to refer to 1.5, BUT without any multiplication shenanigans.
VonReposti 3 points 2 years ago
Correct.
- Half to the second (halvanden, still in use today) = 1.5
- Half to the third (halvtredje) = 2.5
- Half to the fourth (halvfjerde) = 3.5
- Half to the fifth (halvfemte) = 4.5
And so on. You might notice that I sometimes write it like "halvfemte" and other times "halvfems". The latter is just the way it was spelled when used in a combined word (another fun quirk in Danish that we inherited from Germanic this time!). 90 is today spelled just "halvfems".
gravitas_deficiency 3 points 2 years ago
nickwitha_k 2 points 2 years ago
Sorry to ping you a bunch with replies. I'm curious now, do you have unique numeral symbols for the numbers after 9?
VonReposti 6 points 2 years ago
No, we use the same numeral symbols as everyone else. We just pronounce it in the most unintuitive manner possible.
I can imagine that we once had symbols representing the base 20 system but standardised at some point to decimal symbols. I though haven't encountered any piece of history to back that up.
atro_city 62 points 2 years ago
For a real explanation of this watch this illuminating video.
TL;DW According to the perons, it's based on counting sheep and from base 20. 1 score = 20 sheep. 2 score = 40 sheep.
To get to 50, you have 2.5 score, but they don't say "two and a half". They are quite Germanic and say "halfway to 3" (Germans do this too). So, 50 = half three score.
The video also points out that English has (as the hodgepodge of a language it is) yet another remnant of Germanic languages: 13-19 are not "te(e)n-three to te(e)n-nine", but "three-te(e)n to nine-te(e)n", just like in German "drei-zehn bis neun-zehn".
It's quite easy to mock other languages, but there's always a reason for why things are the way they are. Think of Chesterton's fence.
PlantDadManGuy 11 points 2 years ago
There's also a reason for imperial measurements, but it's still a worse system than metric.
DragonTypeWyvern 13 points 2 years ago
Yes.
Stop being weird, Danes, literally everyone else figured it out.
It'S tHeiR gErmaN hEriTaGe
If the Frisians can figure out how not to be a bunch of weird number freaks while running around on clogs on their dikes and being half fucked up French the Danes have no excuse.
Kellamity 8 points 2 years ago
I agree with your broader point about linguistics, but Chesterton's fence has never sat right with me. Consider the inverse:
This annoying and unnecessary fence is an inconvenience, but since nobody can remember what it's for, we dare not remove it
CannedYeet 7 points 2 years ago
Chesterton's fence is a warning not to commit this logical error: I don't know what this fence is for, therefore I know there is no reason for it.
It doesn't say never to remove it. It means you should try and figure out why it's there and ask around before removing it.
acockworkorange 1 point 2 years ago
AGRARIAN REFORM!!
Zoomboingding 4 points 2 years ago
It's just a logic exercise that advicates forethought when enacting change. The bigger problem is people taking parables and thought experiments as gospel, faithfully adhering to the text without considering it's intent.
More people need to read Asimov's Foundation
roguetrick 2 points 2 years ago
I honestly don't understand what's insightful about it. It encourages a functional viewpoint that results in you inventing proposed uses for something that is a vestige of an inefficiency. Justifying something useless isn't curiosity, it's just masturbation. You should identify how a structure interacts with it's current environment. There's a reason functionalism is considered worthless in sociology.
TheMagicRat 1 point 2 years ago
I think the point is more that you should take care to consider why it was put there because it might be something that is not immediately obvious.
You should identify how a structure interacts with it’s current environment.
OK, but what if it was put there to stop something that only happens once every 10 years? Without taking the time to learn this, you might tear it down and then after a few years you're scrambling to solve a problem that was already solved.
roguetrick 2 points 2 years ago
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I'm very hostile to excuses for conservatism because they're often positions to apologize for power structures that have a secondary gain. The point I'm making is you should never approach something that previously existed as if it was beneficial by default. It's often not and that's a fallacy as much as automatically believing it's useless. That's what this guy was doing with his Catholic apologia.
You should consider history to develop predictive theories(like what you're describing). But those are always subordinate to observable reality and bothering with trying to justify them too much is generally worthless. Sometimes you just need to act, considering inaction is an action itself.
In essence, it's a bad argument because it both presupposes you don't interrogate why things exist(you do, that's the entire point of the argument in the first place) and argues that an unknown reason might exist you might have to defer to. No shit. There might also be an unknown reason that it's incredibly destructive. Neither of those themselves are an argument, but one is certainly an appeal to tradition masked by an analogy.
kungen 6 points 2 years ago
there's always a reason for why things are the way they are
Of course, no one is saying that the Danes were so drunk that they simply wanted to make their numbering so much different than everyone else. The problem is that they don't want to change it, probably because "it has always been this way" or something.
Even Norwegian, which was historically more like Danish, changed to using "normal" counting in the 1950s. So it can be done, but Danes seemingly don't want to change, despite the fact it makes their language harder to learn/use.
atro_city 1 point 2 years ago
Change it to what? Twenty-one? One Twenty? Four times twenty and one? Four time twenty plus ten and five? You could go the Germanic way, the Anglo-Saxon way, or the French way. Probably there are more ways to express numbers.
It's not as straight forward as imperial to metric, where metric is logical and imperial isn't. A vigesimal system is logical, just like binary or hexadecimal.
joel_feila 2 points 2 years ago
even imperial had a logic when it was made, same with every old measurement system. Everyone has hands, fingers, and arms boom you have small scale. The acre was once just what a single ox and plow could do in 1 day. there was never a need to square feet per acre, who would ever need that. Plus look at how old system were written. Try uses the metric system with roman numerals.
atro_city 2 points 2 years ago
How many inches are there in a foot? How many in a yard? How many in a mile? More importantly: why? The foot is from a duodecimal system (12 points = 1 line, 12 lines = 1 inch, 12 inches = 1 foot), but then then suddenly 3 feet = 1 yard.
Also the imperial system is simple, not logical. Sure, it's based on body parts and simple things like that, but every moron could've seen that hands have different sizes. Now you have about 3 imperial systems (international, British, US) maybe more even more if the old colonies invented more units. Everyone knows the way forward for units it the SI units. It's logical, it's straight forward, and it's used worldwide - except for a minority of regions that are staunchly are against it.
InvertedParallax 5 points 2 years ago
This comment makes me so sleepy...
rumba 3 points 2 years ago
but there’s always a reason
By and large, there's a reason for everything, but it's just not always a good reason.
If I have 100 rocks and take away 8, the answer to how many rocks I Have should not require a math problem. We're counting, not making change. If your counting system isn't decimal-based, you're no better off than the US using imperial measurements.
MisterFrog 1 point 2 years ago
I agree 13 -19 in English are out of place, and 11-12 are left over from duodecimal, however changing some spoken order is way less cursed that doing fraction multiplication.
I for one, would love if we started saying ten-one, ten-two, etc.
This small part of Danish is definitely fair game to tease. It's all in good fun!
Venus_Ziegenfalle 59 points 2 years ago
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.
EddoWagt 34 points 2 years ago
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
neatobuilds 12 points 2 years ago
Phone numbers should always be said by individual digits, makes it simpler and faster to type as you're listening
AnUnusualRelic 7 points 2 years ago
In some languages, pairs work fine.
Slovene 1 point 2 years ago
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LorIps 1 point 2 years ago
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ECB 13 points 2 years ago
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!
Aceticon 2 points 2 years ago
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)
UndercoverUlrikHD 11 points 2 years ago
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.
blackris 4 points 2 years ago
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?
SpaceNoodle 2 points 2 years ago
It just feels weird saying it the other way tho
Venus_Ziegenfalle 1 point 2 years ago
Based and logic pilled
rumba 30 points 2 years ago
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
Nariom 11 points 2 years ago
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)
rumba 6 points 2 years ago
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 :)
Nariom 2 points 2 years ago
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).
SpongyAneurism 1 point 2 years ago
(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.
Nariom 1 point 2 years ago
... 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.
StThicket 44 points 2 years ago
Norway used to count like the Germans, but switched after the introduction of the telephone. There were simply too many mistakes when telling the numbers to the operators, that a change was mandated.
Old people might still use the 2+90 variant though, but it is not very common.
sockenklaus 5 points 2 years ago
German's my first language and I am kinda proficient in english but I never realized that the english numbers 13 to 19 work like like ours...
Nangijala 27 points 2 years ago
That meme is so lame. 92 in Danish is two and a half fives. The 20 part is old-fashioned and literally nobody has used that since the 1800s.
2 and a half fives' twentieth = outdated cringe. 2 and a half fives = actually how it is said today.
It's still a friggin nightmare to get someone's Phone number verbally, though.
Nangijala 5 points 2 years ago
When you have to write down numbers, but the person reading you the numbers speaks slowly 💀
Them: "Two..."
Me: "2"
Them: "... and fifty"
Me: "... 2 - 52"
Them: "Six..."
Me: "6"
Them: "... and twenty."
Me: "6 - 26"
🫠
GoosLife 6 points 2 years ago
No, in Danish the "half five" part means the same as "half past 4" on the clock: 4.5.
Then the part that most people omit nowadays, sindstyvende, means times 20.
(Half past 4) times 20 = 90.
JacksonLamb 14 points 2 years ago
That only makes it worse.
Two and a half fives = 12.5.
Nangijala 3 points 2 years ago
More like 2 and half fives. Half five is our word for 90. So in essence we say 2 and 90 but the word 90 is half five.
80 is fours
70 is half fours
60 is threes
50 is half threes
40 is forty
30 is thirty
20 is twenty
10 is ten.
Oh and a 100 is a hundred. So I dunno what happened between 50 and 90, but I'm sure there is a funny story behind that somewhere.
Nangijala 1 point 2 years ago
I never claimed otherwise. I'm just tired that this 92 meme is using outdated language (or numbers rather) to make a point that may have been reasonable to make in the 1800s, but not today. Doesn't mean our number system is any less retarded today. If anything, I'm just adding on to the fact that Danes are notoriously lazy with the Danish language and will cut corners with all words and sentences the same way Americans cut corners when they chop everybody's name up into bite sized nicknames. For us, though, it's more like slurring at the end of a word and flat out ignoring letters that are very clearly there in the word.
Woe is the poor asshole who decides to immigrate here and attempts to learn the cancerous gargle that is our language.
That said, it is still the best language to curse in and when used in poetry, it can be downright majestic.
But yeah, our curses are superior to all words in the English language.
My favourite for life will always be kræftedme = cancer eat me - usually uttered in a sentence to underline how pissed off you are and how serious you are about being pissed off.
JacksonLamb 1 point 2 years ago
More like 2 and half fives.
Even worse! That would be an indeterminate number that starts at 7 and goes up by 2.5 increments depending on how many half fives there are (since in this version it's not specified, but has to be more than one).
7, 9.5, 12, 14.5...
I love this. I thought English had some crazy aspects but this is next level.
petersr 11 points 2 years ago
Dane here. No one actively thinks of 90 (halvfems, 2 and a half fives) as a mathematical expression. Is is just a word for 90. So we say 2+90 like Germany.
Would it have been nice if that word meant "9 tens", yes, but Danish is a just a stupid language where you have to learn a bunch of things by heart unfortunately.
werefreeatlast -3 points 2 years ago
How would you say trump is like Hitler? Do you have to describe the Holocaust in few words within a long ass German style word?
bstix 6 points 2 years ago
Easy. We often use idioms for comparisons.
One old way would be: "Trump and Hitler are both 2/3 yards from one piece" which means "They're cut from the same (bad) fabric".
Fabric was cut in an old measurement"alen" which was 2 foot or 2/3 yards, so simply stating the length would be understood as fabric, similar to how everyone knows that a 2x4s is a piece of wood and such.
werefreeatlast 1 point 2 years ago
Ah yes! I understand the culture fully now!
ObviouslyNotBanana 8 points 2 years ago
Denmark = outdated cringe
Just kidding neighbor, I love you all
ObviouslyNotBanana 2 points 2 years ago
Let's grab a rød pølse and some surströmming
edit: evil combo of the year
ooli2 26 points 2 years ago
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
Diplomjodler3 39 points 2 years ago
What if I told you that all words are made up?
kelseybcool 15 points 2 years ago
schibutzu 19 points 2 years ago
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.
jwmgregory 3 points 2 years ago
hard agree i actually think france’s method of counting is pretty intuitive
name_NULL111653 4 points 2 years ago
Agreed. Fourscore and twelve just works (English used to use this, at least in formal speech and writing).
ObviouslyNotBanana 1 point 2 years ago
Yeah France is fine
CherryBullets 13 points 2 years ago
French language uses math to speak numbers if anyone is wondering about France.
Edit: Apparently I wasn't precise enough for the dude below. It starts at 70 and ends at 99 every time you get to those numbers. De rien, tabarnak.
NikkiDimes 3 points 2 years ago
Not quite. They just have remnants of an old base 20 system that kicks in for specific numbers.
CherryBullets 2 points 2 years ago
Je le sais, je parle français .-.
NikkiDimes 1 point 2 years ago
Haha, nice. Sorry, I meant no offence, was just further explaining the weirdness of French numbers (I love that kind of shit in languages)
Atomic 4 points 2 years ago
Kamelåså
RichardDegenne 1 point 2 years ago
For good luck
ObviouslyNotBanana 9 points 2 years ago
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.
ObviouslyNotBanana 2 points 2 years ago
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.
fenrasulfr 4 points 2 years ago
Same in Dutch,
"Vijf voor half vier"
sodamnfrolic 1 point 2 years ago
You can say the same in Poland. "Za pięć w pół do czwartej."
TheOakTree 9 points 2 years ago
So do you mean to suggest "quatre-vingt-dix" just means 90 and doesn't also mean "four-twenty-ten"?
FundMECFSResearch 6 points 2 years ago
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.
MrScottyTay 8 points 2 years ago
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.
1rre 13 points 2 years ago
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.
Skua 6 points 2 years ago
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
sloppychops 6 points 2 years ago
shakes fist THE DANES!
samus12345 5 points 2 years ago
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie...
samus12345 2 points 2 years ago
That still fits the pattern of "bigger number, then smaller number."
samus12345 2 points 2 years ago
It does exactly, and I didn't notice that. "Four score and twelve."
roguetrick 4 points 2 years ago
Four score and a dozen.
HamsterRage 5 points 2 years ago
93= Four score and a baker's dozen.
KoboldCoterie 4 points 2 years ago
Your coloration took an innocent map of Europe and somehow made the thumbnail look dirty. Good job!
slappypantsgo 4 points 2 years ago
Is this a Michael Hobbes joke?
kameecoding 4 points 2 years ago
The map is wrong, Czechs can do both 2+90 and 90+2, I am not sure if it's regional within the country, or depends on the context, but they definitely use both versions
umbraroze 2 points 2 years ago
Oh yeah, one of the pics that inspired me to study French. I was dreading the numerals but it's not that bad. You count tens and twenties and sometimes they're special. And numbers below 20 have specific names, but that's kinda true in most languages.
A lot of languages have weird corner cases. (Like, in Finnish most numbers are perfectly regular. Except 11-19 which are not "one-ten-and-x" but rather "x-of-the-second". I'm sure there's a reasonable etymological reason. At least they're not "teens".)
ObviouslyNotBanana 16 points 2 years ago
It's bad, but not danish bad
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Even worse. 90 in old Danish is "halvfemsindstyve" but it is rarely used today. The "sinds" part is derived from "sinde" means multiplied with but it is not in use in Danish anymore. That leaves halvfems, meaning half to the five (which is not used alone anymore) and tyve meaning twenty (as it still does).
We are in current Danish shortening it to halvfems which actually just means "half to the five" in old Danish (2.5) to say 90. 92 is then "tooghalvfems" (two and half to the five, or 2+2.5). The "sindstyve" part (multiplied with 20) fell out of favour.
So we at least have some rules to the madness. Were just not following them at all anymore.
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