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Comment by pedrosorio | Hacker News Reader

The bbc article claims in the UK (and “many countries in Europe”) start with the thumb, but the Inglorious Basterds scene seems to contradict that.

The business insider article also claims people start counting with their thumb in Portugal but I start with the index finger and while I’m not sure everyone else does it, I think using the 3 middle fingers to represent the number 3 (like the British spy) is far more common than using the thumb.

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I'm Canadian and I'm assuming it's the same as Brits: We start counting with our thumb but if we represent a number less than 5 without counting then we do not use our thumb. That's why it doesn't contradict what happened in Inglourious Basterds.

English here, and yes counting starts with the thumb but going direct to two or three is just fingers. Middle three for three, not pinky and the next two or the shocker. This isn't universal, but in my experience by far the most common way.

Our spoken and written language is a mess of inconsistencies, why shouldn't our numeracy be!

Canuck here too, I grew up starting with index but I see lots of thumb starters.

If I start counting thumb-1, index-2, middle-3, i can't raise my ring finger without the pinky coming up to properly display 4 fingers up.

If I start counting index-1, middle-2, ring-3, my thumb holds down the pinky to display 3 fingers.

Until just now, I had never tried, so I assume it is a practice thing.

Edit: should have read further in the thread. i'm clearly not the only one

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