Counting in the wrong language
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70 is pronunced "60 10". 71 is "60 11". And so on until 80, which is pronounced, obviously, "4 20". 81 is "4 20 1". It goes up to 90, which is "4 20 10". 91 is "4 20 11". The craziness continues until 100, which is, thankfully, a different word ("cent", instead of "4 20 20", or, dear lord, "60 40"). But in 170 it all comes back.
I think the French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Canada did the right thing when they replaced all that complexity by dedicated words for 70, 80 and 90.
Did I somehow come up with "octante"? Is it not used in Belgium, or anywhere else? It's true that it sounds a lot more Greek (my native language) than "huitante".
Many French people believe that it is used in Belgium and Switzerland though, for some reason, but as far as I know that's not true (I live in Belgium, although not in a French speaking region).
I make a disservice to Pascale, the first lady who taught me French, and who was, herself French, by saying it was a Belgian woman who taught me French. The Belgian lady, Catherine, taught me _most_ of my French but I first started speaking French with Pascale.
Which is to say, it's possible I learned "octante" from Pascale, although she was far from old enough to have learned it in the early 20th century.
So I'm guessing "octante" is still used in some French-speaking places, although not that widely.
And I'll probably sound rather quaint if I use it myself :)
[For the record, I'm Greek but I learned French very early on because my dad had cousins in the Greek diplomatic corps and he wanted me to get a job there and he thought French is the language of diplomacy. I was not interested in that, of course. But at least, thanks to my dad's silly ambitions, I grew up practically billingual.]
66 is "six and three twenties" 77 is "seven and half four twenties"
I've been told that Danish accountants use Swedish or Norwegian numbers to avoid mistakes.
https://blogs.transparent.com/danish/2011/09/14/counting-in-...
(This happens a lot in Danish. It's incredibly sloppy on pronunciation and people somehow mostly still understand each other.)
EDIT: I had to think about it for a bit, but the situation for 77 is actually equivalent. No speaker of Danish actually thinks about "halvfjerds" as a compound number -- it just "70". I suspect it's actually very similar for French speakers, but their hyphens do make it harder to just lump the thing into a single concept/number :).
Pronunciation is the same, unless there is a liaison: elle a quatre-vingts ans = there will be a 'z' sound between vingts and ans.
FYI, I'm a native speaker and I had to look the spelling part up to be sure. There are other rules with other exceptions for cent, mille, million, milliard.
Even though I grew up with it, I find the English system impenetrable. Quick, what's 3 months before November? I have to count it out every time. (In mod 12, -3 is the same as +9, so I just count forward 9 months.)
The names of the months are a nice nod to our Roman history but they are a pain in the rear to use. It's high time to relegate them to second-class status, like Roman numerals.
September = sept = 7 = month 9
Octobeber = oct (as in octal) = 8 = month 10
November = nov = 9 = month 11
December = dec (as in decimal) = 10 = month 12
Person A: "Isn't it just awful that SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember and DECember aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months?"
Person B: "They should stab whomever changed that."
(For those who may not know, that is a reference to Julius Caesar who inserted July, and if you didn't know that you may be interested to know that Augustus inserted August. Hence we are off by 2 months.)
Edit: Apparently, I -- and the very funny person B -- were misinformed. Jan and Feb were inserted, and different months were renamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar
So Jan and Feb were inserted.
I have to leave the original up as it is because the joke is too good, but I will leave this note as a correction.
> It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar, it being the month of his birth. Prior to that, it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the 10-month calendar.
This stuff is fascinating. Reminds me of how the Romance language weekdays are named after the Roman pantheon and the Germanic (including English) weekdays are named after the approximate germanic counterparts for those same Roman gods.
The reason for the discrepancy in names is due to the fact that March used to be the first month of the year. It was changed to January hundreds of years before Caesar came along, so the naming scheme was already 2 months off by that point.
Depends on your perspective. In the US (really, in Britain), this change occurred during the lifetime of George Washington, who arguably lived hundreds of years after Caesar.
;p
The funny thing is that other Slavic countries use similar names but some are moved 1 month back or forth because flowers bloom earlier/later there :)
And days of the week are simply numered starting with sunday = "niedziela" (not working day), "poniedziałek" (after not working day), "wtorek" (secondary day), "środa" (middle day), "czwartek" (fourth day), "piątek" (fifth day) and "sobota" (sabbath).
I never remember the names of the roman months and have to count them starting from january.
My grandpa is still fluent in them, my parents knew about them and probably knew how to use them once upon a time, I know them as something you see on very old calendars and a curiosity we learned about in kindergarten.
All I remember is that my birthday month, October, is called listopad because it’s when leaves fall down
Just goes to show how little this stuff is used nowadays :D
Although wikipedia[1] says that listopad is an alternative name for October. I am now sufficiently confused.
I don't know for a fact it had the accent over the last letter. Records here in the US exclude it, of course that hardly means it wasn't there originally.
Also it's not accent, it's softening of the n sound, similar to Spanish n with ~.
Wow. It took me a second, which is weird since I have no trouble seeing 11/5 and 8/5 as November and August Fifth, respectfully.
At some point I just want to train myself to say it the "right" way, even if it sounds wrong in german and people will look at me weirdly. But somebody has to start the trend, right?
If you mean 42 and read out "zwei und vierzig" I will pause and have to figure out if you meant 240 and you know it. This kind of thing just seems almost intentionally inconsiderate because of the unnecessary ambiguity.
But I can see how it would be annoying in german.
As weird as the german digit flip is, French I understand is worse with the number names, actually involving math.
Not trying to be difficult... from what little I remember of my 2 years of college German, zwei und vierzig is 42.
Consider this: "sixty-nine" is clearly 69. But when spoken out, especially in a long string of digits (like an IBAN, a banking code) that might be announced as "six, nine" or "sixty-nine" or "sixty...nine" or even "six...ty-nine".
So even in English there's some chance of ambiguity whether it is supposed to be 6-9 or 6-0-9 (consider: "forty-two, sixty, nine" for 4-2-6-0-9).
In German the awkward inversion makes this worse. So you might get "neunundsechzig" (6-9), "neun...undsechzig" (9... no, wait, 6-9? or maybe 9-6-0?) or "neunund...sechzig" (...6-9). Although the last one is unambiguous, you're basically stuck waiting for the end because you're trying to write digits down left to right and don't want to skip digits and backtrack.
As for why "neun...und sechzig" is ambiguous: with that weird pause it's not clear if this is still 69 or literally "9 and 60" (which is what the word "neunundsechzig" means), i.e. 9-60. As people sometimes emphasise the final digit or digit pair by saying "and" before it (like you would in a list of words), this is ambiguous and at least might give a listener pause.
"Hundert" and "und" generally aren't similar enough for this to be a problem and there's a special place in hell for people who read out groups of digits longer than 2 as numbers, so this isn't generally a problem. Most people do however tend to slur the "und" so e.g. "sechsundsechzig" becomes "sechsnsechzig" but this rather avoids the problem I mentioned (except for the backtracking).
9 und 60 vs. 9 hundert 60, if you speak quickly then the "ert" part of hundert is often swallowed, making it more difficult to discern between the remaining "hund" and "und".
The closest I can get to ambiguity by slurring "neunhundertsechzig" is "neun oder sechzig" or "neun, neununsechzig", never "neunundsechzig", and I have to make an effort to speak faster than I normally would even if I was reading out numbers in a hurry. I've also never run into this ("hundert" and "und" being mixed up) in my daily life, so I'm surprised to hear that this is something you hear often.
zwei und vierzig versus zwei hundert vierzig are radically different to my ears.
The counting thing is annoying but not as annoying as French numbers in my not so humble opinion. Though I guess English had it at one point with things like 4 score and 7 years ago (a score being 20 years, so 87 years ago)
Guess maybe I'm weird but outside of the "flip last two numbers around in your brain in German" it never struck me as much more than: Well that's weird, least its not french numbers under 100 where I have to add mentally so no big deal.
You don’t think of quatre-vingt dix as four-twenties ten, you just think of it as ninety just like in English.
I suspect the same is true even for native speakers, your brain is going to pretty quickly map to the actual number it represents rather than the arithmetic statement.
French numbers are the same way. If the only system you've ever used is a shitty system, the shitty system is the only logical way of doing things. Human brains are smart, but also dumb. That's actually the point of this article.
I am slowly training myself to intuit SI units, especially at work. It's better, and I know that, but it's fucking hard. I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to be able to replace it for cooking. It's just too deep. Probably the same as a Frenchman who learned to count in French. Learning to cook with standard units was coincident with learning to speak. You simply can't renovate those memories.
They're still bad systems though.
Modern: 32 = "thirty-two" (similar to English)
Old: 32 = "two-and-thirty" (similar to German)
The modern system was introduced by the government in the 50s as a requirement from the national phone operator.
This was before automatic switches were common, so users had to speak with an operator to patch to the correct destination. They insisted that the old counting method introduced too many errors. The government agreed and made a new law requiring schools to teach the new method.
What's more interesting is why being good at maths/physics is considered very uncool in English-speaking countries (not sure about other European ones), but is actually seen as cool in, say, Russia or Bulgaria or Singapore [citation needed]. It is not seen as strange or unusual for girls to be better at science than boys either, possibly because it is not uncool [another citation needed].
I would say that has a much, much greater impact on outcomes than how numbers are represented in the different languages.
Why do you think that in English speaking countries is different than others? I temporarily currently living in France and I do not have many contacts with non scientists, but the ones that asked me what I do all found it cool sounding.
In my experience in Russia, "nerds" were rather those that were extremely diligent but did not really have passions or interests; being good at science was actually seen as kinda cool. Sports achievements were not really emphasized at all.
But it is all anecdotal, and I would like to see some actual studies on this.
In Swaledale, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, sheep farmers used to, and some still do; count their sheep in a very curious fashion. Instead of One, Two, Three, Four... they go, thus: (1)Yan, (2)Tan, (3)Tether, (4)Mether, (5)Pip; (6)Ezar, (7)Sezar, (8)Acker, (9)Conter, (10)Dick; (11)Yan-a-Dick, (12)Tan-a-Dick, (13)Tether-a-Dick, (14)Mether-a-Dick, (15)Bumfit; (16)Yan-a-Bum, (17)Tan-a-Bum, (18)Tether-a-Bum, (19)Mether-a-Bum, (20)Jigget. Having reached Twenty, they then take a stone [or make a mark upon the ground or a piece of wood, thus the term 'a score' or 'twenty'] representing the Twenty sheep that they have counted; and if they possess more than Twenty sheep, they go for another twenty:
Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Another Twenty, another stone. Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Again,Twenty, again another stone.
Jake Thackray 'Molly Metcalfe' 1971
So because of language it's not natural to think of 1300 as 13*100, it's much more natural to think of it as 1000+300.
But it's still better in Polish than in German ;) At least we don't do mixed endian like "hundred two and twenty" :)
We do that in every other range too. It would be completely normal to read 3700 as "thirty-seven hundred".
In what I assume is a related phenomenon, long numbers can be read out in digit pairs rather than single digits (say a PIN code 3742 - "thirty-seven forty-two", as opposed to "three seven four two"), though the digit pairs idea breaks down when a 0 is present.
Poles do it as well, in pairs, triples or single digits, doesn't matter. But only for numbers that aren't quantities. Like - ids, account numbers, zip codes, phone numbers - no problem, but reading population or account balance that way would be weird.
Minor nitpick but people will say, "twelve hundred" not "twelve hundreds" (at least in all of my experience growing up in the US). The reason being, you have eight hundred, nine hundred, (we don't talk about ten hundred), eleven hundred, twelve hundred, and so on. It's kind of like a continuance of how the hundreds below 1000 are named.
Interestingly you will hear sometimes "ten hundred" when talking about address systems where each block increases the address by 100. Such as, "the ten hundred block of Example street." But I've never heard it anywhere else.
So your point does not contradict mine.
On one tricky problem, he unconsciously started muttering the numbers out loud, and I was surprised to hear him saying them in Tamil (he is from Sri Lanka, but we spoke only English at home as far as I've known).
I asked him about it later, and he said that in his head, he always translated the numbers or problems into Tamil, solved them, then translated back to English to present the solution - because he was taught maths as a kid in Tamil.
He could still do all that faster than I could in all English!
We also lack[1] the 10,000[2] word (but also Chinese doesn’t have the 100,000 word like some others do)
[1] that’s a near-pun.
[2] No one says myriad to mean 10,000.
I was charmed to learn that the word for a times table in Chinese is 九九乘法表, literally "nine-nine-multiplication-method-table".
One assumes the table goes up to 9x9.
So I've decided to generally stop doing maths in Dutch. Our company is international so we all work in English anyway so when I do stuff in eg Excel, calc.exe etc, I just count in English. When I speak in Dutch, I generally simply avoid the last digit in large-ish numbers. Eg I don't care what language I say "250" in, but when I'm speaking Dutch I'd round "252" to "about 250", which is fine enough in most contexts.
FYI fun trivia: Norway fixed this about their language. They used to do what the Danes do but now it's like in English etc. They not only made up normal proper words for eg "50" or "90", but also reversed 2-digit numbers, eg "42" in Danish is "to-og-fyrre" and in modern Norwegian it's "førti-to". That's a pretty ballsy way to change a language and I'm jealous.
>For example, Dutch kindergarten children performed worse than English children on a task that required them to roughly add together two-digit numbers. This was despite the fact they were slightly older and had better working memory, because Dutch kindergarten starts later than in the UK. But on nearly every other metric, including counting ability, roughly adding and comparing quantities of dots, and simple addition of single-digit numbers, the two groups performed at the same level.
This is rather surprising. I would have guessed that adding numbers verbalized in little endian order would be easier because it makes carryover much more natural.
Though another issue is that carry right is an exception for the 10s place.
Relatedly, I've been thinking a lot lately about programming style conventions, and how some people prefer very explicit code while others prefer implicit. For example, something as "simple" as leaving out the return keyword where it can be omitted at the end of a function versus leaving it in. The latter can be called "transparent", whereas the former requires a little deeper knowledge of the system.
Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a clump of 5 trees and knowing it’s 5 without having to “say” “five” in your head.
But try tapping on the desk or clapping your hands and counting how many times you did it without saying/thinking “1, 2, 3, 4...”
I wonder if associating a transient stream of inputs with a count may be impossible without mapping it to some other sequence in your head, like linguistic numbers/letters.
Brains can track a number of discrete objects (from 3 to ~7, depending on species and maturity). Once we get past this number, brains tends to interpret it as 'many'. From the studies we looked at, it appears that the brain can innately count within this number, but reverts to 'many' representation after it.
Ex. crows can count three people going into an obscured area with food, and know that once three people have left, it's safe to get the food, as there aren't any people left.
And numbers are a computed property, so we don't have to know all the possible numbers, just the rules:
let firstIndex = 0
var nextIndex: Number { return nextNumberBasedOnSomeRules() }
https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePos...
Among the few languages I know, I can easily recite the first twenty digits after the decimal point in Mandarin within three seconds. In English it’s just painful, at least for me.
I don't think I'm alone, the basic value of pi one learns in France is "3 14 16" - "trois quatorze seize" (historically it was "trois quatorze-cent-seize" so "3 1416" but it's less used today).
You mean single syllables? All syllables are definitely not created equal, some are harder to pronounce than others, and some don’t combine nicely when pronounced side by side.
> do you have a way of remembering them?
I do, but that’s beside the point. s/reciting/reading out loud/ if you wish.
Edit: I see the confusion now. I didn’t mean “remembering” within three seconds, that would be insane for most people.
By the way, digits are almost monosyllabic in English too (with the exception of seven) but not even remotely as nice.
And for the same reasons, really. Putting together things like "Four Twenties" makes sense when you only count to a hundred, and less sense when you need to, say, express the speed of light or the size of an electron. I'm sure the musical system made a lot more sense with diatonic sounds, but once you add in accidentals, you're just retaining backwards compatibility because it used to work and the then-living people were familiar with it.
I asked "Well then, what's 7 times 11?"
"It's seventy-seven."
"Okay, I bet you don't know what 12 times 11 is."
"Twelvety-twelve", she gleefully replied.
We agreed that twelvety-twelve is a perfectly good number, we know what it is, but if we were talking to other people we would tell them one hundred and thirty two – for us, twelvety-twelve is just fine.
– Bill Thurston, Groups, Tilings and Finite State Automata
As a bonus, a native asian language speaker effectively has to learn place value at a very young age to learn how to count.
My wife learned all of her math skills in English, but she still sometimes counts in Cantonese. When we play blackjack, if I’m taking too long she’ll tell me the value of my cards in Cantonese, because she’s adding them in her head in Cantonese.
It’s just quicker.
Obviously not a direct correlation, but I’ve been surprised at how critical my internal vocalization of words is to my ability to solve a word puzzle game I’ve been playing recently.
In short, my ability to find a word that matches a pattern of blank letters is almost entirely dependent on my ability to pronounce those that might fit. If the word that matches has a pronunciation that doesn’t quite fit the usual patterns, I’ll have a very hard time recognizing it.
One, two, three, ... Second-one (11), second-two (12), second-three (13), ... Third-one (21), third-two (22), third-three (23), ...
ie you have an off-by-one error in the tens digit as you are counting.
Modern Finnish retains this for 11-19, but mercifully sanity returns for numbers above that.
I read that as: of course, we know there are other possible explanations but we won’t dive in the research literature and we’ll instead indulge ourselves in this Sapir-Whorf based article because it’s good click bait.
The only interesting fact presented is that there is a slightly performance penalty in execution (not result) on some arithmetical tasks that never happen in real life based on the way to express numbers in subject’s native language.