To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
For instance, for the last five years or so I've been seeing GT translate the Greek word for "swallow", the bird, to the French word for "to swallow", the verb [1]. In Greek and French, the two words have nothing in common (Greek is helidoni/katapino, French is hirondele/avaler). But in English, they are homonyms (swallow/swallow). It seems that GT sees a Greek word, translates it in English, then finds a set of homonyms and simply chooses the translation that's most "likely", meaning the one that's used to most often- which of course means it gets one meaning wrong all the time.
Last year Google made a big todo about its neural nets inventing an "interlingua", an intermediary language to which and from which all other languages it knows can be translated. In practice, I think this "interlingua" ends up being just plain old English.
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[1] Recently I started seeing the translation "machaon", a kind of butterfly, which Google translates in English as "swallowtail". "Avaler" is still available as an alternative.
Although in this case, if you translate "halb zwei" from German→English it correctly translates it to "half past one".
http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/goog...
“…a multilingual NMT model trained with Portuguese>English and English>Spanish examples can generate reasonable translation for Portuguese>Spanish although it has not seen any data for that language pair. We show that the quality of zero shot language pairs can easily be improved with little additional data of the language pair in question,” the paper states.
I sometimes get disappointed when people suggest that machine translation is a substitute for actually learning the languages. It's true that we have limited time in our lives to study languages, and the machine translations can be a quicker way to get the gist, or possibly open some doors. But go much beyond that, like claims I sometimes see that you can wear AR goggles and suddenly communicate like a native, and you set unreasonable expectations. Or perhaps imagine a world where the way to read Shakespeare is to put it through a machine and it tells you, "statistically, Shakespeare meant to say this". Is that really reading it?
I imagine there are other languages around the world that share the same kind of similarities among themselves.
Same applies to other non-English languages, like Spanish and French, not sure how much this affects English variants as well.
Most of the time one gets a translation that isn't fully correct from the point of view of how the language is actually used in a specific country, sort of mixing American and British English on the same sentence.
"quarter after", "half past", and "quarter til" are the ones we use.
Agreed though that the French is the most easily understood internationally.
I've even heard of "three quarters (of) two" in German, which means 1:45.
When I imagine it from the English-speakers perspective, I think "viertel" (quarter), "halb" (half) and "dreiviertel" (three quarters) are probably to be understood like this:
"halb zwei" = "half two" = "1/2 2" = (2 - 1 hour) + ((1/2) * 1 hour) = 1.5 = 01:30
There are actually regions that use terms like "dreiviertel zwei" (three fourths of two) to indicate 01:45 and "viertel zwei" (one fourth of two) to indicate 01:15. Especially the latter confuses people from other parts of Germany, because regular high German uses the terms "viertel vor zwei" (a quarter to two) and "viertel nach zwei" (a quarter past two).
Almost all Danish people know that "halv to" is "half one".
Some searches also seems to support that this is something that at least did not become common until the 80's or 90's in the UK, and it makes sense that schools various places would lag behind.
> "a1791 F. Grose Olio (1796) 107 C. Pray what's o' clock? W. It will be half ten."
But until looking this up myself, I hadn't realised Americans and Australians always included the "past". Was your teacher British?
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Assuming you have some familiarity with Danish numbers, you might like another definition: "half, preceded or followed by an ordinal numeral, was formerly used to express a half-unit less than the corresponding cardinal numeral; thus Old English þridda healf, Middle English thridde half or half thrid = two and a half. Obsolete."
Example (c1200 Ormulum (Burchfield transcript) l. 13777) "Þatt sahh. & herrde daȝȝwhammliȝ. Hallf ferþe ȝer þe laferrd" so hallf ferþe means 3½, "halvfjerde".
It's an odd enough thing that I didn't realize that anyone did this until maybe a year or two after moving to London in 2000, as most media as well tend to include the "past", and it's still common enough to include "past" that it didn't really register with me for a while that some people skipped it. It's hard to tell when I noticed, as I would always include "past" because I'd been taught to, and might very well have heard times without it and assumed implicitly the half was there without noticing it was omitted for the same reason....
The Danish definition is the opposite, and consisted with almost all other Germanic languages, and what's giving rise to this discussion. Norwegian has the same as almost every other Germanic language in that respect.
It's the English one that is out of step, and specifically modern English, as the Old English and Middle English examples follows the older Germanic use.
Compare Middle English "half thrid" with modern Norwegian "halv tre" which has the same meaning.
Searching Google Books, I came across "A Dictionary of the Scottish Language", John Jamieson (1846) that contains this:
"HALF, s. This term frequently occurs in a Scottish idiom, which affords mirth to our Southern neighbours. If you ask "what's o'clock," when it is half-past-three, a Scotsman replies "Half four", i.e. half an hour to four. "Ha!" says the Englishman, "then I must wait dinner a long while, for it is only two o'clock!" But this is a good Gothic idiom, yet common in Sweden; half fyra "half past three; half an hour after three;" Wideg.; literally "half four."
So apparently until at least the 1840's, Scotland held on to the Germanic way, while it seems likely it had fallen out of use in England given that the author expected it to be confused for "half of four" rather than "half past four".
So now I'm curious if this has changed meaning in Scotland since then too, and if so when. I'm assuming it must have, or I'd assume there'd be a greater awareness that this would cause confusion.
There seems to be very few uses of the modern English version in books, and the oldest unambiguous mention I've come across so far other than your example and the above dictionary (which uses it in the wider Germanic way) and a Scottish book from 1841, seems to be from 1997.
I've also found one from 1968 where I can't tell whether or not it uses the modern English or not, and whether or not it reflects genuine English usage or a mistake, as it's published in an American student publication (Generation, volumes 20-21, published by students at University of Michigan) and written in a broad English dialect that I can't tell for sure if is genuine or "adopted" by an American for the purposes of the story.
I'm sure there must be more, but it does seem like its more wider use is a a very recent thing - most mentions I can find are 2010 and later.
I've just sampled, but e.g. specifically searching for "half four" in in the 19th and 20th century gave me just a handful examples, while "half past four" gave me thousands. But of course that could mean it was just predominantly used orally. I've tried "half five", "half three", "half six" too and skimmed, with similar results, but not looked exhaustively. And of course this is Google Books - it's certainly not exhaustive.