Danish numbers
olestig.dk
olestig.dk
Edit: Now that I think about it, maybe the Swedish 90 (_nittio_) should be seen as "9×10" (_nio_×_tio_), since that's at least the etymology. I don't know what to make of the German _-zig_ in _neunzig_. Regarding Japanese, I dont' speak any. Finally, if you allow yourself to dig deep enough into the origins of the French and Danish 20 (_vingt_ and _tyve_, respectively), it appears that they too could be split further as "2×10".
German, being logical and little endian, wins by getting the most significant part last, about when you finally pay attention :)
Totally true, you often find people wondering what exactly the pattern is. A good language teacher will tell you though.
> A Scandinavist language reform movement tried to get the 20-based forms replaced by 10-based like Norwegian and Swedish have. With absolutely no success.
If this is a real movement, they need better PR. I've never heard anyone make this case. What's the point anyway?
Interestingly if you look at French, there's a similar thing with the numbers between French French and Swiss French. Soixante-dix vs septante, and similar for 80 and 90.
Well it would be easier for learners to pick up for one, but I actually think the system is annoying, even as a native speaker. When someone tells me a phone number or similar, I will often ask them to read out the digits one by one because writing down the numbers can be difficult with the alternating order.
I was very pleased at a concert when the barman said "niti fem" -- was this the reform I'd heard about, from reading this page? No, said my friend, it's just my spoken Danish is so bad the barman thought I was Swedish, and tried to be nice.
I've lived here for two years, and I still can't reliably distinguish between "fem og tres" and "fem halv tres".
In Danish we just have a lot more irregular ordinals. Practically no-one in Denmark knows about the 20-based number system.
> A Scandinavist language reform movement tried to get the 20-based forms replaced by 10-based like Norwegian and Swedish have. With absolutely no success.
Danes are unusually stubborn that way.
Every Dane I've asked just knows the numbers. It's confusing for foreigners, since many (most?) also know at least two other European languages. When I hear "tres" I'm thinking "three", and it obviously does mean three. It's difficult to think "sixty" instead.
That's the thing about irregular words: if they are rare, native speakers tend to use the regular form, and in this case we have a peculiar situation where there is no regular form!
When learning the 10's in Danish, I think it is very important to leave logic behind and not look for a system. As a kid I had a lot of trouble with 50 and 60 and eventually settled on "the one with "half" is smaller than the one without" and did the same with 70 and 80.
Note, this is a parody aired by Norwegian TV, hilarious to anyone who tried learning Danish at least;)
Edit: on the same theme, how to pronounce any Danish word https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAAkBMeXoAAzpZV?format=jpg
Spanish: uno dos tres.... (15) quince, normal from 16 on.
French: normal begins at 17 (dix-sept), but runs into trouble later on (courtesy of a friend):
70 - soixante-dix, sixty-ten, 80 - quatre-vingts, four-twenties ("score"), and 90 - quatre-vingt-dix, four-twenty-ten.
That makes 99 "quatre-vingt-dix-neuf".
German is the same pattern as English, normal after 20, but prefers the smaller numbers first.
I have heard that the Russians need to study their conventions intently...
odin dva tri ... desyat (10) odinnadtsat dvenadtsat trinadtsat ... dvadtsat (20)
there is no irregularity other than 40 which is sorok instead of chetiredesyat
Compound hundreds are also unpredictable. Yes, historically the varying forms are clear (the back yer in Common Slavonic sŭto ‘100’ was lost or strengthened depending on position), but learners today without any background in the Slavic languages simply need to learn them by rote.
For me Russian numbers were simpler than French because you could learn the basic idea quickly, and then pick up subtle sound shifts by watching tv/reading.
(disclaimer, i am not a native speaker but learned Russian at school age so may be misgudging the difficulty of the language)
The oddest thing of all is apparently the simplified form is an old French usage that got replaced by the Gettysburg-Address-style “four score” more recently. Why they would change in that direction is a mystery to me.
Exampel: 54. It is pronounced: fire-og-halv-treds (four-and-half-threes.) As you might notice, the spoken sequence is backwards compared to the written number. this gets even more confusing when saying a number above 100. 136 is et-hundrede-og-seks-og-treidve. (One-hundreds-and-six-and-threes).
- 20,000 is 20 k or 20 grand.
- 1900 is 19 hundreds not 1 thousand 9 hundred.
In Japanese numbers are also different:
- there's a word for 10,000 (man), therefore 20,000 is not "20 x 1,000" (ni jyu sen) but rather "2 x 10,000" (ni man).
- there's a word for 10^8 (oku), making 1 billion = jyu oku (10 * 10^8).
The lower powers 10–1000 take a prefix of 2–9 to multiply them, and omitting the prefix means one.
1 ichi
2 ni
10 juu (not ichi juu)
20 ni juu, literally two ten
100 hyaku
200 ni hyaku
The powers of 10000 seem to take an obligatory prefix 1–9999, formed the usual way (I've never heard just "man" for 10k, always "ichi man", and 12340000 would be literally translated to "thousand two hundred three ten four ten-thousand", while none of the smaller powers seem to ever take a prefix > 9.)
The above is based on not living in Japan, though, so the sample of numbers I've seen might well be missing some things that occur in actual native speech by someone not teaching a first-year class.
Largest one I've seen is 10^68.