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moffkalast

And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example:

German: einhundertfünfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy)

Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy)

Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring languages:

Polish: sto siedemdziesiąt pięć (one hundred seventy five)

Czech: sto sedmdesát pět (one hundred seventy five)

Slovak: sto sedemdesiat päť (one hundred seventy five)

Hungarian: száz hetven öt (one hundred seventy five)

Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five)

Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five)

Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic

You get the idea.

Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system.

Sincerely, a Slovenian.

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You put so much effort into that and then totally missed French? four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course. Multiplication and addition required.

That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.

Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"

Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like English, but without the inconsistencies.

4444 = Four thousand, four hundred, four ten, four.

Though it is interesting that they group by powers of 10k instead of powers of 1k.

> Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like English, but without the inconsistencies.

Not really. "One thousand five" is 1,005 in English, but it's 1500 in Mandarin. For 1005 you'd need to say "one thousand zero five".

Could that be where “3V3” style notation came from? In electronics, 3V3 means 3.3V, not 3/3V or 3x3V or 3.003V, and likewise 1R5 means 1.5 Ohm. It’s handy but took me a while to get used to.

Don't know; Chinese usage seems unlikely to have been influential in the relevant time period.

There is another oddity in Chinese numbers which requires a bit of grammar explanation:

Chinese requires measure words when applying numbers to nouns. English has count nouns and mass nouns ("three crackers", where "cracker" is a count noun, versus "three loaves of bread", where "bread" is a mass noun); Chinese has only mass nouns. [1] Thus:

三个人 "three (三) people (人)", with 个 being a measure word appropriate for people

一只狗 "one (一) dog (狗)", with 只 being a measure word appropriate for animals

一首歌 "one song (歌)", with 首 being a measure word appropriate for poetry

Most nouns use 个.

The oddity is that 半 ("one half") occurs before the measure word when it represents the total amount, but after when it's a modification.

一个小时 "one hour (小时)"

两个小时 "two (两) hours"

半个小时 "half an hour"

一个半小时 "an hour and a half"

This also occurs with money, where it's probably the same grammatical rule:

三块 "¥3"

三块二 "¥3.20"

But for this to be fully consistent, I'd expect 零个半小时 "zero and a half hours" where in reality 半个小时 is used.

[1] Some people have argued that since e.g. "one day" 一天 has no measure word between 一 and 天, 天 must be a noun that requires no measure word. This is wrong; it is a measure word that requires no noun. An easy way to see this is that reduplication carries the same meaning that generally applies to reduplicated measure words, and not the meaning that applies to reduplication of nouns -- 天天 means "every day" in the same way that 个个 means "every [one]"; it does not mean "cute little day" in the same way that 狗狗 means "doggie".

Can you just say the measure words like you do in English then? Like "I'll have 3 loaves please". I guess it would be like 三个 or similar?

Also thanks for saying that they're equivalent to things like "Schools of fish" or "loaves of bread". They make way more sense to me now!

> Like "I'll have 3 loaves please". I guess it would be like 三个 or similar?

That's it exactly, and it's very common. Any time the noun is clear from context, you can leave it out. (You shouldn't leave out the measure word though - where in English you might have "I'll take three", in Chinese you'd still want 三个.)

If you walk into a restaurant, someone will ask 几位 "how many?". 几 is a question word for small numbers, and 位 is a (formal, polite) measure word for people.

Japanese is like that too (probably got it from Chinese), with the added fun that it has two sets of numerals: the indigenous Japanese one and the borrowed Chinese one. So you not only need to memorize the counting word but also which kind of numeral to use.

No, that's just pragmatism. The origins happen to be US/American:

It's the most compact, non-ambiguous representation, and avoids symbols that print poorly or are not available everywhere.

Ah, yes, shorthand, which the language loves. So the shorthand here is that if you don't add a unit qualifier then by default it's the next largest power of 10. So, "1,500,000" can be shortened from "1 million 5 hundred thousand" to "1 million 5", based on the theory that you're much more likely to use "1,500,000" in real life than "1,000,005". So then of course, to handle the latter use case, you now have to add the qualifier "1 million 0 ten 5", and then we shorten that of course to "1 million 0 5".

> "1,500,000" can be shortened from "1 million 5 hundred thousand" to "1 million 5"

Is this actually true? There is no "million" form in Chinese. Powers-of-1000 separators don't make any sense in the language either[1]. 150,0000 is, fully, 一百五十万 "one hundred five ten 10,000". And you obviously can't shorten that to 一百五 "one hundred five" because that's 150, not 150,0000. You could try saying 一百五万, but I don't think that makes much sense.

[1] The incompatibility between the Chinese number system and the English number system has resulted in Chinese speakers in America innovating the unit-of-salary "K". 工资几十K？ One K is, of course, USD 1000.

That's more of an analogous example. In Chinese you would shorten 一万五千 to 一万五.

Chinese is sweet and consistent until 10,000. They introduced a new word for it, wan(万) instead of 10 x 1000.

Why is that inconsistent? There are also separate words for 1, 10, 100, and 1,000, so why not 10,000 ?

If your number separators are every 3, then it feels weird. If it's every 4, then it does not. Change numbers into 1, 10, 1000, 1'0000 and then it doesn't feel like it's going against your writing habits.

Dunno about China, but Japan is a weird mix of two systems:

- Groups of 4 digits separated by the corresponding power-of-10000 kanji, e.g. 1億2345万6789. Makes sense, I would say it's actually better than just separating the digits, as it makes easier to recognize the size of the number.

- Groups of 3 digits separated by commas, e.g. 123,456,789. I asked around how they do to mentally regroup digits by four, and everybody told me that is quite difficult and don't understand why they don't group digits by four. Then again, they have the most difficult writing system in the world and a ridiculous calendar, maybe they just like challenges.

>That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.

AFAIK the net effect is that languages with complicated number representations do worse on math tests.

>Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"

Can you say that the same about English? ie. four-ty = 4 × 10

edit: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be...

>Can you say that the same about English?

It's similar but I don't think it qualifies as the same since we do not say "four tens". Forty is a concept in itself, just like suffix -s for plural is a separate concept from singular. Suffixes and prefixes are modifiers. We don't ordinarily say, for example, "many apple", we say "apples".

When I say eight-ten in Chinese, my mind is thinking of the singular concept '80', not 8 tens.

The same as when I say eight-y in English.

There was some theory that because the first ten digits in Chinese are very short phonetically that it is easier to keep numbers in your head.

The first numbers are short in every language. That doesn't distinguish Chinese in any way.

Taking some salient examples, in English 9 out of 10 of those numbers are single syllables and 7 is two. In French, all ten are single syllables.

It does distinguish Chinese. It's quicker to count to 10 in Chinese than in most other languages.

Malcolm Gladwell did some good research ('Outliers' is a great book) in this area.

Chinese are generally better at math than other ethnicities precisely because of their language.

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.

Gladwell points out that the English speakers have about 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly, but the Chinese are almost certain to get it right every time. He explains, "Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. "And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds," Gladwell adds.

https://gineersnow.com/students/best-explanation-asians-good...

Well if we're just speculating here, I'll add that since Chinese is tonal, Chinese speakers will remember the tune of sequence, not just a list of values. It's easier to remember a melody than a phone number.

Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like they were talking to infants or dogs :)

You don't normally use it for numbers but you certainly can, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ

Another useful mnemonic that for me works even better than melody is rhythm. I noticed that I have about 20-notes buffer for last-heard rhythmic phrase even if I wasn't paying attention at the time. So for example after I ran down a flight of stairs I can count them by remembering the rhythm of my steps and adding them. My friend who has way better short term memory than me can't do this, but he can see the image he was looking at recently. Now that's cheating :)

> Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like they were talking to infants or dogs

It might just be more obvious since the English patterns are unfamiliar.

One of the more surreal experiences I've had was watching an English-language news broadcast in China. The presenter was speaking English and had obviously put in a lot of effort trying to learn what natural English sounded like. The general pattern of intonation over her sentences was quite realistic for English.

What made it surreal was that the intonation didn't match the words. Everything she said, it was like she was using the intonation pattern of some other sentence and applying it to a completely different sentence.

Polish has a lot of intonation—which is also kind of unique. I can instantly recognize people speaking Polish, even in larger groups of people talking all kind of languages, just by the very typical sentence melody that sticks out.

But it's indeed quite different to other languages, even the other Slavic ones.

Germanic intonation and sentence melody (for example like in German or English) is completely distinct from the Polish one. And this melody seems to be something sticky as you can always recognize Polish people just by their intonation even when they speak otherwise perfect German or English. That's not the case for for example Russian, or Czech, or Slovak people.

That seems to me like a lack of imagination on his part even assuming he has some grounds for the "2 second" rule.

How does he know that people remember it via "reading out loud to themselves"?

Maybe they visualize it instead.

Maybe people chunk it into a 3 digit and a 4 digit number, like a phone number.

Why should "reading out loud to yourself" be limited to the speed of actual speech anyway?

I’ll be damned, I just tried that and it was exceptionally easier to do in Mandarin, a language that I have to think to count in, than in English.

> Malcolm Gladwell did some good research

This is not something you hear often.

In Arabic, numbers from 1-10 are waaHid, ithnayn, thalaatha, arba:a, khamsa, sitta, sab:a, thamaaniya, tis:a, and :ashara. No monosyllabic numbers, and 8 has four syllables. And even these are short compared to the numbers in Inuktitut.

This is kind of a tangent, but I understand that the native title of the Arabian Nights is 'alf layla wa layla, the book of "a thousand nights and a night".

What is the "one" night in that title? Any chance wa is related to waaHid?

No. “wa” in Arabic corresponds to “and” in English.

>any chance wa is related to waahid?

No, wa (usually in basic sentences) means 'and'. Layla alone means one night. Alf is a thousand, and for certain numbers the singular is used over the plural, which is why it may seem confusing.

Interestingly, in Algerian Arabic, while other numbers are similar, two is different. It's zouj (one syllable). Except when counting e.g. twenty two, where it is similar to ithnayn (more like t'nin)

BTW, it's similar to German in that regard, because it's two-twenty.

Also interestingly, the way 8 sounds in Algerian Arabic would be 2 syllables. Although take it with a grain of salt because it's third-hand information. I learned this from my father, who's not native (but has lived in Algeria in his childhood)

Majority of French speakers say 80 as "4 × 20":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quatre-vingts#French

Not "4×20", but "4 20", and in a single word that means "80" without thinking about 4 and 20.

When you say eighteen, you think just "18" and not "8 teens". (Similarly, when you say "backwards" you think of the direction, not of "back wards")

As a French speaker, you don’t tend to see those as multiplication

You associate “quatre vingt” as meaning 80. In your head it’s 80. You don’t think four times twenty. So it’s not as complicated as it looks. I don’t see kids really getting that wrong.

As someone who only had basic high-school "French as a third language" and was never good at it, I'd still agree with that. it's one "symbol" so to speak for mental parsing.

Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking about because I had never in my life even noticed it. Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply, after all.

It's even funnier when you're learning multiplications and divisions. We still have to think when we do 4 times 20, and every time we realize it's right there in the name.

I get that. It's the power of the brain's user of generalizations, i.e., patterns or classes, to represent things. The brain clearly also handles disambiguation far better than we consciously know to do. It seems like the brain essentially has a class named quatre vingt and it has a pattern of 4*20 that resolved to the concept of 80 which means 20+20+20+20.

It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the ones that moved to the British isles and became the English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems that those interplays and intersections with the cultures are what determined how French language numbering worked based on when and where and what they had contact with.

80 maybe, but 91-99 are properly ridiculous. Sure its easy to get it, but it highlights deeper issue I've had since I've started learning french - its not elegant nor easy language, rather a 'spaghetti code' one, a mess of rules and tons of exceptions, and many things defy logic and are there 'because its like that and you have to memorize it'. You can have great talk on B1 level for example in English or German, with French you are still often lost quickly unless everybody else tries hard to dumb it down for you.

There is an institute in France hose sole purpose is to guard language, I wonder why they didn't find the motivation to clean it up a bit. It would make it much more attractive for outsiders and make it more global.

And its not just me, literally everybody I speak to who attempted to learn french has similar experience. Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you mixed gender of a noun) or often just give up.

This was cleaned up in the Belgian variant of French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French.

- 70 = septante (versus soixante-dix, which is 60-10)

- 80 = huitante (versus quatre-vingt, which is 40-20), *EDIT*: wrong, see below.

- 90 = nonante (versus quatre-vingt-dix, which is 40-20-10)

The article also mentions something interesting I didn't know:

> The use of septante for "seventy" and nonante for "ninety", in contrast to Standard French soixante-dix (literally "sixty-ten") and quatre-vingt-dix'("four-twenty-ten"). Those former words occur also in Swiss French. Unlike the Swiss, however, Belgians never use huitante for quatre-vingts ("four twenties"), with the use of octante in the local Brussels dialect as being the only exception. Although they are considered Belgian and Swiss words, septante and nonante were common in France until around the 16th century, when the newer forms began to dominate.[4]

*EDIT*: This doesn't appear to be true, Belgian French speakers also say quatre-vingt for 80.

It’s the Swiss who fixed it and say huitante. The Belgians say quatre-vingt like the French.

I don't think "cleaning up" a language talked by so many people in the world is reasonable because some people have trouble learning it.

> Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you mixed gender of a noun).

I'm not sure if it's a language problem or a people problem. I often encounter people that mix the gender of nouns, and I don't really care about it. It's a lot to learn and not very important. Just like some people don't have a great accent, that's how it is, it doesn't stop people from communicating. Same for the people that I know, unless we're asked we wouldn't bother correcting someone that "le table" is actually "la table" because tables are female.

On my side, I find the pronunciation of English to be very hard to learn and to master, and am scared of sounding stupid whenever I talk English, so I avoid it, and end up not being good at it, so I can understand the sentiment.

If it’s any consolation, I find English pronunciation very difficult, and I’m a native speaker. It surprises me that in my thirties I still regularly encounter situations where I want to use a word and realise I’ve never heard it spoken before, so have no idea if the pronunciation I use in my head when reading it is correct.

I also often hear others mispronounce words; friends, colleagues, even on TV.

I guess my point is that if you’re mispronouncing English words you’re speaking it like a native!

I’m French and, at least in my circle, I’ve never seen a native French « humiliating » a non-native trying to speak French.

And to me there is two reasons : - we know our language is difficult to learn - we are really bad when it comes to speak any foreign language

As*oles are totally a thing (especially in the banking/financial sector) but most French people are admirative of anyone who speaks more than one language. Because most of us can’t.

Got off a train from Brussels at Gare du Nord and asked at the kiosk for “une cafe sil-vous-plait”, guy behind the counter responded in English

I don’t bother now. Germany, Italy, Greece, sure, but not France.

My guess is that you didn't say "bonjour" first. Major faux pas.

I'm an American living in Japan and the this happens quite a lot - even among friends who I'm pretty sure mean no harm.

It seems like a lot of people have this very strong "foreigner = English" mapping in their head. As soon as you're outed as "foreigner" for any reason, you get the English (even if you're proficient in the local language).

I definitely think it's disrespectful to switch languages on someone like that, but a lot of people just don't seem to think about it. Multi-lingual conversation manners are not commonly talked about!

Most likely he responded in English because he felt it would be easier for both of you, not because he wanted to humiliate you.

On the receiving side it comes off as "just stop trying and buy something"

Which is really quite reasonable if you are at the front of a queue of people waiting to buy something, or if the cashier has something else to do like make coffee for the people who already ordered. The intent is very unlikely to be to humiliate the foreigner.

Maybe it's a cultural difference but I have a hard time thinking that this is impolite. I'd have do the same and it wouldn't mean that your french is not perfect but only that I would like to ease your life.

Brussels is increasingly English-speaking in general, and folks who work in the train areas in particular have to be fully fluent in French, Dutch and English, where the latter is just the default communication choice if you detect someone is not a native Dutch/French speaker. As well the area around the Noordstation is particularly unwise for a tourist to visit for cafés, so it is extra important for them to get across where you ought to go.

An amusing version of this happened to me in Porto recently at a bookshop. Many moons ago I was fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, but today that's retained mostly in reading, I can't speak well nor can I easily follow European Portuguese speakers. I was browsing the Portuguese literature section when the shop keeper asked me question (which I didn't catch), and then upon ascertaining I spoke English she rather forcefully explained where the English section was, but very confusedly watched as I politely kept where I was. To make matters probably more confusing I ended up buying a linguistically avant-garde book that I soon learned really is best suited for native speakers (Guimarães Rosa, the author, is basically a Brazilian James Joyce)

The Swiss French speakers found a way around that: nonante. Ninety, the Swiss way, not bothered by the French Academy.

You might be having difficulties speaking/understanding the language with actual French people not because it's difficult/random (and it is, I believe that most teenagers can't write a full page of faultless French !) but because spoken and written French are quite different : contractions ( j'sais pas instead of je ne sais pas), using 'on' instead of 'nous', the simple past is never used, slang, etc. Since foreigners tend to learn written French, things get difficult quite quickly when in the field. Obviously, you're not allowed to write spoken French.

Interestingly enough, if you listen to people talking in the 50s (old films, radio, etc) , they speak something which is a lot closer to written French. I'm under the impression that there's a growing gap between spoken and written French, and the French académie is not helping by essentially preventing the written language from evolving.

As to cleaning it up, well, lots of people agree with you, but always end up facing extremely strong opponents who accuse them of destroying the very nature of French culture!

The English Eighty comes from proto-Germanic and means eight groups of ten.

Would you call 'four hundred' multiplication? That's a strange way of looking at it for me.

Long ago “forty” in English may have begun as “four ten” which most likely became “fourteen” but four tens could have maybe become forty.

"Fourteen" (four and ten) would have been from "scoring numbers", where you get to twenty (a score), keep track of the scores separately, and start over. Up to twelve, we used a duodecimal/dozenal system (a separate word for each number). That was also common in other non-Germanic Indo-European languages, notably the Brythonic Celtic languages (and various versions of Brythonic scoring numbers are still used in parts of Britain, depending on the pre-English dialect spoken in the area and changes over time, especially in children's games). French numbering still shows signs of "scoring", especially in the 60/70 and even moreso in the 80/90 region.

As a native Mandarin speaker, I don't tend to think of the "ten" as a ten. If anything, for me it conjures up an image of the number of 0s. So, the "hundreds" part in "four hundreds" would just means four followed by two zeros, etc. I may even have been taught this as a child; can't remember. Anyway, no arithmetic involved, at least not explicitly.

I don't know that this generalizes -- other Mandarin speakers may have a different experience. I'm really curious how Chinese-speaking people thought about these things before Arabic numerals, but not sure we can ever have a clear answer to that question.

> That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.

I would say more that simplification makes the boring bits easy and allows the mind to concentrate on more interesting higher-level concepts. As someone who has attended a range of educational institutions for the same courses, one thing that really stood out to me about the "top-level" ones was that there was none of this "life must be hard" attitude. For the core material, the teaching was excellent and designed to make it as easy to learn for students as possible to learn. Then while "lesser" universities were examining students on those core materials (often with questions they'd seen before), the top universities asking novel questions on material that hadn't even been explicitly covered, but which the students could reasonably be expected to answer on because they had a really solid grasp of the core stuff.

"life must be hard"

Ah yes, this is very german.

If it is not a grind, it is not really work you are doing.

And it is still kind of a honor badge to moan about how little you sleep, as this shows how hard you are working all day and the ones sleeping the most less, are the hardest.

(But I do see some healthy change in that regard)

> the ones sleeping the most less

Good god, this is beautiful. Is this a German idiom?

Not literally, as far as I know (I am also still wondering, of whether it was correct grammar), but there are plenty of:

"Morgenstund hat gold im Mund"

morning time is gold

(to which I agree at times)

"Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm"

The early bird catches the worm.

(to where I say, maybe the worm should have slept in that day)

I think the poster you are responding to is referring to the “beauty” (sarcastically, I assume) of the phrasing “most less” instead of “least.” It would be right in line with the confusing way numbers are spoken.

Yeah, I feared as much.

I guess it is just an english grammar issue Germans often make (less, lesser, least and so on for single syllable words and x, more x, most x for the rest). The german equivalent of least is also just one word: wenigsten.

I don't do sarcasm (and it's against the HN guidelines, btw).

"Sleeping the most less" is a beautiful turn of phrase, even if ungrammatical. Or maybe because of it.

French is definitely weird in that it introduces multiplication, but the addition operands are still in descending order as with English.

> I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring

Probably not much. I doubt francophones are doing multiplication when they think of the number 80 any more than anglophones do addition when we think of the number 14. Rather, speakers presumably both memorize the names of each number and move on with life.

A trivial aside: English used to have something similar in a "score" being 20. So "four-score and ten" would be 90, not too dissimilar from the French.

English still has it. Nobody took it away. It's still in use.

How? What is a common modern day use?

I think it's still used a bit in British English, along with other things that strike the American ear as archaic like 'stones' and 'fortnights'.

The same meaning of a group of twenty. "There must have been a score of cars at the drive-thru." It hasn't changed.

It's barely ever used nowadays though, whilst 30 years ago you'd hear it occasionally, similar to a gross, or things being referred to in yards. It's changed IMO.

I think it's part of how we've tended to remove dialect and en-gb terms as we've more intra-UK mixing and more non-UK born residents?

You might not hear it often, but that doesn't mean it's barely used. English is spoken by more than just English people. I reckon I hear "score" used in the sense of twenty of something than I hear words you'd probably describe as more common, such as "laden" or "bereft."

Might I enquire the context and locality where you hear 'score' used?

You are right, I mistakenly assumed we were talking about en-gb.

I live in the southeastern United States. It's common for conveying the size of a group, for instance. If a lot of people showed up to an event but not on the scale of hundreds, it's common to hear "scores of people."

It's not common in my job to talk about scores as a metric because 20 isn't a natural unit for my work product, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear it like that, either. We still use "dozen" and "gross" for other non-decimal groupings much more commonly, e.g. "a dozen doughnuts."

As someone who has lived in the west and northeast, I’ve never heard the word score used to mean 20 outside of Lincoln’s address. In most dialects in the US, scores has just been relegated to another synonym for many and doesn’t get used outside of it’s plural form. Interesting to hear that there are places that still use it occasionally, much like I occasionally hear “gross” used as you mention.

Obviously Americans know it from the Gettysburg Address where Lincoln referred to the US being founded "four score and seven years ago", but he was being intentionally poetic, but you may not count 19th century as "modern" (even though from the linguistic perspective it is), but people often say things like "there are scores of movies where the protagonist finds out he is a prophesized hero" even today.

That usage (“there are scores of x”) is figurative and doesn’t literally mean “20 * n”.

My dictionary says it's "archaic".

You are, of course, technically correct but I can’t say I’ve ever heard it used outside of old books and plays, or fiction set in the past.

No, it is a word like ananas or worm, an image in your head.

Nobody in France would do any multiplication, it is just a word.

We have a weird language ('eaux' is 'o', imagine that?) but this is not one of the crazy things.

It's easy to pick on the weirdness of french numbers, but honestly "quatre-vingt" ends up just being a word like "eighty" in its own right. No French speaker is multiplying 20s in their head.

Probably the only true weirdness is the 70s and 90s because they use the teen words like douze and treize, but that's honestly where the weirdness ends, and larger numbers follow very consistent rules.

> four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course

As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as ninety. Nobody thinks about this in term of 4 * 20 + 10. Although, I remember that it confused me a little bit when I learned how to count.

That being said, I'd be in favour to switch to the Swiss/Belgian/Canadian way and replace "quatre vingt dix" by "nonante".

Sad fact: French Canadian don't use the (much better) Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante and the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch.

It's a shame because soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix are confusing to write (I probably made a mistake somewhere).

Note that Belgians ans Swiss don't agree on 80. It's huitante on one side and octante on the other (but I don't remember which is which)

Interesting, I knew Swiss said octante and my Belgian friends all say octante as well. Perhaps it's a regional thing?

Swiss person here. This "octante" idea needs to die. In my 30 years in French speaking Switzerland, I've never heard or read "octante" ONCE. It might be used in Belgium, but I'm not even sure about that.

Not to be that guy that argues with a Swiss about how Swiss talk but we get broadcasts from "RTS Un" (I think that's what it's called) and the announcers most definitely say "octante". I also followed a few Swiss YouTubers a few years ago and they all said "octante" as well. Maybe it's a regional thing?

EDIT: Actually now that I dug up a bit more stuff it does seem like "huitante" is the one? Maybe I am just remembering wrong, feel free to ignore my ramblings.

I will indeed feel free to ignore your ramblings, because you're thinking of "huitante" :-P

> French Canadian don't use the (much better) Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante

Sorry for the mistake (I did check on wikipedia before adding Canada do the list but got it wrong).

> the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch.

Same in France. I believe most of us regard "septante/octante/nonante" as amusing and exotic sounding. Sadly, I've never heard anyone advocating for a switch.

I'm a french canadian and I've never in my life heard someone use "septante/octante/nonante". I understand the difficulty while learning French but, as a native speaker, we don't even think about it.

> As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as ninety.

But only 90 and 97-99 have "quatre vignt dix". 91-96 are written as "four-twenty-eleven" through "four-twenty-sixteen".

So you can't really avoid the complexity, because only half of the numbers in the 90s have '''90''' as part of the word.

>>Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.

Citation needed?

Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. Removing complexity is difficult. Einstein, Feynman, Newton, and innumerable others are lauded for simplifying enormously complex ideas to the point of comprehension by the masses.

Oversimplifying is bad, because it implies lost information. Simplification itself is a form of sophisticated articulation.

More efficient representations of numbers are generally associated with better performance in math, historically. Roman numerals being a prime example of unnecessary complexity, compared to the maths being done by Indian people, and so on. Civilization tends to abandon conventions that are superseded in advantage.

Making things more difficult to formulate for structural reasons unrelated to the problem at hand is inefficient.

Having inefficient numbering in language is wasted energy at best.

> Simplification is itself an act of intelligence.

For the people who simplified things (Einstein, Feynman, Newton). For anyone who never had to learn or have anything to do with the more complicated system before it was simplified, it most certainly isn't an act of intelligence.

Indeed!

"I wanted to write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time"

> Simplification is itself an act of intelligence

Obfuscation is an act of counterintelligence.

>Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"

This is exactly what forty means, except it goes back to the Proto-Germanic fedwōr tigiwiz and so the meaning is obfuscated. Much simpler to use the same word, no?

Interestingly, the dialect of French spoken in Belgium has a name for 90 - nonante.

They still use quatre vignt for 80 though.

> 40 is "4 tens"

so is "forty", optimized for quick pronunciation, a respelling of four tens.

I've never understood how Russian 40 is sorok, nor have i ever gotten an explanation, including from Russians, whereas the rest works like english, etc.

To be fair, it's a matter of language development and evolution. "Four score and seven years ago" is essentially the same thing, just a couple of hundred years ago, the French just kept it in the language.

> And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example: > Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five) > Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic

As a German speaker with Ex-Yugoslavian roots, I'd like to point out that you have a mistake in your list.

In Serbo-Croatian (former official language of Yugoslavia) 175 (sto sedamdeset pet) is actually the order in which the number is written. Only between 10 and 20 the pronounciation is somewhat the other way around. But like the French colleague in this thread it could easily be argued that the numbers between 1 and 20 have their own words because it's not tri-deset but trinest for 13. This could be because e.g. tri-deset is actually used for 30, which sounds like three times ten. It seems Slovenian counting is more similar to German, while Serbo-Croatian is more similar to English.

Serbo-Croatian counting examples: 1 - jedan

2 - dva

3 - tri

4 - četiri

5 - pet

6 - šest

7 - sedam

8 - osam

9 - devet

10 - deset

11 - jedanest

12 - dvanest

13 - trinest

14 - četrnest

15 - petnest

16 - šesnest

17 - sedamnest

18 - osamnest

19 - devetnest

20 - dvadeset

21 - dvadeset jedan

32 - trideset dva

43 - četrdeset tri

54 - pedeset četiri

65 - šesdeset pet

76 - sedamdeset šest

87 - osamdeset sedam

98 - devedeset osam

100 - sto

101 - sto jedan

111 - sto jedanest

121 - sto dvadeset jedan

212 - dvesto dvanest

222 - dvesto dvadeset dva

...

Very close to Polish.

My wife ist Polish. This might explain it.

It would be rather jedanaest, dvanaest, trinaest (at least in Croatian) - your version sounds how it is shortened in pronounciation in some regions. Also šezdeset with "z".

I have been living in Austria all my life. I might not have misspelled some things :)

Hi, yes, I assumed it would be the case. And it is not always easy to explain word terminations/cases. Especialy if you do not use it regularly or is limited to family interactions. I would guess your pronouncian might come from either some parts of Lika/Dalmatia or Bosnian part closer to Croatia. Is it the case?

Might be slavic influence, is the same in Romanian.

I’ll just add Danish: et hundrede og femoghalvfjerds (one hundred five and four scores where the fourth score is a half)

Sincerely, a Dane :)

"Hmm, having the most difficult to pronounce/hear phonetics in the world wasn't hard enough, we should also mess with the numbers" - the Danes, I presume

If you want something completely insane check out standard French. 97 is "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" which translates directly to "four-twenty-ten-seven". Quebec French does this sanely though at least.

This is so sweet. J’adore le français.

Also, Belgians do that sanely too.

70: soixante-dix (FR) "sixty-ten". Septante (BE) is literally seventy (seven decades), which is much better.

And so on and so forth for 80 (octante in BE) and 90 (nonante).

Edit: fixed seventy

In Belgium (belgian french) we don't say "octante" for 80 (said in Switzerland maybe) but "quatre-vingts" (four twenty. 4-20). So 87 is said "quatre-vingt-sept" (four twenty seven). For 70 and 90 it is right.

Depends on the canton in Switzerland. To my knowledge most say “huitante” except for Geneva which says “quatre-vingt”.

Most people I know (from various Romand cantons) actually use both a bit randomly, I assume due to the strong French influence. What's funny is that they don't realise it until you point it out.

Octante as far as I know has been dead for a while and is not used anywhere, in Switzerland or elsewhere.

If your French is bad like mine you can get away with those even in France.

I hope my french is okay.

> 80 (octante in BE)

Nope. That’s switzerland, belgians completely illogically have kept the 20-based naming here.

Thanks the for correction.

So do Belgians do it 100% like the french? Or so they mix a bit of FR and CH?

The latter.

Sorry, but it’s also “quatre-vingt-dix-sept” here in Quebec. We do manage haha (it’s something you get used to / absorb as a native speaker, although it is of course a barrier for those learning the language)

You’re probably thinking of Belgium and Switzerland where 97 would be - as far as I understand - “nonante-sept”

See this other StackExchange on the topic (and geographical exceptions to the octante/huitante (!)/nonante usage): https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/187/quelles-parti...

Same in Catalan.

80 - vuitanta

Four score and seven-ten years ago :)

No, it translates directly to "ninety-seven" or to however you spell "97" in any other language.

> Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation

I only knew term #1 and term #3, thanks.

Let's prove that English is insane by making a literal translation of that Wikipedia definition in French:

> Littéral traduction, direct traduction ou mot-pour-mot traduction, est le traduction de un texte fait par traduire chaque mot séparément, sans regarder à comment le mots sont utilisé ensemble dans un phrase ou phrase.

I'm not sure what you're trying to show there. Literal translations are always janky but can still be used to demonstrate things.

A similar literal translation from english to english of 97 would be nine-tens-seven. English has some irregularities in the teens but it's decimal all the way through. French switches from decimal to vigesimal.

> I'm not sure what you're trying to show there. Literal translations are always janky but can still be used to demonstrate things.

I'm trying to show that using a method that can only produce nonsense out of a given source is not the best way to demonstrate/prove _anything_ about the source. At best, it proves that literal translation is garbage, which is something everyone knows (except at tech giants, apparently).

There is only one way to translate "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" in English while preserving its meaning: "ninety-seven".

Pointing out the decimal <-> vigesimal switch (and the historical debates around it, for example) or the fact that the two systems cohabit would be far more useful and interesting than constructing a strawman in order to conclude that a language is "insane".

A literal translation is the easiest way to show what happens. I don't see the problem.

If you perform the same literal translation to 57, it doesn't look "insane". When you say the method "can only produce nonsense", I think you're just flat-out wrong.

If you’re a native speaker I imagine that’s true, but if you learned the language later in live it remains a pain. I feel comfortable discussing love, art and politics in French but I still dread writing down a phone number!

That’s about as odd as the danish ”syv og halvfems” which is “seven and half five” meaning “seven and 4.5 twenties”, so 97.

Yes, the "halvfems", "half five", could be translated as "half of the fifth twenty", or even "halfway of the fifth twenty (from the full fourth one)".

Luckily it is only numbers 50 to 99 that work that way. 31 is simply "enogtredive", as in "one and three tens". A hundred is "hundred", not "fems", as it could be (five twenties).

German swapped numbers are also possible and correct in Czech language "sto sedmdesát pět" is the same as "sto pětasedmdesát".

Yes, but it sounds archaic, if you use the swapped version.

Uh, it does not (unless you're 12 or so, I suppose).

Slightly older... older enough, that I remember Vlasta Burian's movies being aired in the tv, where it would fit.

I use it basically just for tram and bus numbers. It's more fun to say you're taking the dvaadvacitka instead of dvacetdvojka.

It is archaic but not in all contexts. i.e. If you talk about 125 ccm motrbike, it is always "german" way. Also it is used for human age or dates.

To add to the list, Arabic also counts the same way.

مائة وخمسة وسبعون (One hundred and five and seventy)

I suspect that the German way of speaking comes directly from arabic and the fact that we have adopted the whole numbering scheme, digits as well the name for 'digit' (ziffer) sounds like 'zero' which is the key innovation of the number scheme.

You are also forgetting that you are comparing two totally different language trees (Germanic and Slavic) … ignoring Italian for the moment.

You essentially listed German and several dialects of the same language. If you had listed several of the German language dialects that also slightly vary how they say the number in the same German format/order you would have had a list of equal if not greater number of support for the German format.

I think that may also provide a bit of a clue as to why the order/format is different since it must have happened some time after English formed from the German language, possibly when/because the British adopted the format/order of the Romans. But that's just speculation/hypothesis on my part. I suspect there are people who have a better insight into how that separation happened.

Dutch: honderdvijfenzeventig (hundred five and seventy)

Ah yep, seems like there is actually one more:

Danish: hundrede femoghalvfjerds (hundred five and seventy)

And the rest I've checked now:

Romanian: o sută șaptezeci și cinci (hundred seventy five)

French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen)

Swedish: hundra sjuttiofem (hundred seventy five)

Finnish: sata seitsemänkymmentäviisi (hundred seventy five)

Norweigan: hundre og syttifem (hundred seventy five)

Spanish: ciento setenta y cinco (hundred seventy five)

French should translate to "hundred sixty fifteen" which is another level of aberration altogether (I'm French)

Ah right I remember hearing somewhere that you guys don't have words for 70, 80, and 90 and do this odd sum of two thing. I suppose there are worse ways than the reverse German :D

The French language has such words, but Frenchmen don't use them. For example they prefer to say the old fashioned "quatre-vingt-dix" (4 - 20 - 10) instead of the perfectly fine "nonante" that French speakers in Belgium use.

It's the same in Switzerland, which makes an order of magnitude more sense IMO:

Soixante

Septante

Huitante

Nonante

Cent

Does the cognitive energy expended by French to do basic counting conditions their brain from early childhood for mathematical proficiency resulting in so many great mathematicians whose native language was French? </end_of_joke>

What I always wonder, do French programmers generalize this numbering scheme to pronounce 0x4B as quatre seize onze?

More precisely, French (cent soixante quinze) is actually: hundred sixty fifteen. Seventies, eighties (quatre-vingt = four twenties), and nineties (quatre-vingt-dix = four twenties and ten) are a mess in most French dialects.

the Danish is actually a little more complicated

the word for 60 in Danish is tres the word for 50 in Danish is halvtreds - so basically half 60 (I guess cause the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?), and since Danes don't pronounce the d and the halv is quick sometimes you get confused in what is being said.

But then the word for 80 is firs, fee-es with a partially swallowed r sound in there somewhere. and 70 is halvfjerds - half firs.

The word for 90 is halvfems - half fives.

a Dane speaking quickly can confuse others really quickly with these numbers as to whether it was said 50,60,70,80,90 and then you put the second number in 'backwards' as said, so

92 is to og halvfems - toe oh hellfems and so forth, but said very quickly with a tendency to not fully pronounce all of a word.

> the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?

No other Nordic language is like that.

It's probably not a coindicence that the same system the French use. Apparently French was the coolest language you could speak in the 1700s and all the nobility did it.

Only the Danish swalllowed the "twenty" part of the it, so it's no longer possible to deduce any meaning from hearing the word. Add that to the fact that "half" has a universally accepted meaning too, but should be understood here as "ten-less-than".

So I think Danish wins the most bizarre counting system over the French. And the French is far more so than the German. All they're guilty of is being careless with the ordering of numerals.

>> the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?

>No other Nordic language is like that.

ok, I was just guessing, hence the question mark.

But I guess Boris Jensen described the reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369172

The system is actually based on scores, 20, which is called a snes in older Danish, so halvtreds is short for halv tredje snes, the half third score, and 60 is tres, short for tre snese, i.e. three scores and so on. So for the tens between 50 and 90, we count scores, and if it's not a whole number of scores, we name it the half of the score that we are into. It's also preserved in a very infrequently used variant word for 80, firsindstyve, which is just 4 score, more explicitly (tyve is the modern word for twenty). In conclusion: Yes, the Danish number system is relatively silly.

Danish is in fact slightly more complicated. They have a vigesimal system with a base of 20, with halvfjerds, or halffourth, meaning 3½ times 20. So rather hundred five and three-and-a-half score.

Norway has an alternative that is the same as the Germans. (175 - hundred and five and seventy)

It was more popular in the past, but is still used in many dialects.

I grew up with both the old one and the new one so I sometimes say it the old way and I am almost happy that my kids don't understand it immediately so I have to correct myself.

Fun fact: it was actually decided in Stortinget (the supreme legislature of Norway) in November 1950 and implemented in July 1951, as far as I know the only time a matter of how to pronounce something has been decided at that level.

Norway have had at least half a dozen language reforms in parliament that dictate the written language, and so indirectly pronunciation.

E.g. the 1907 reform removed a lot of soft consonants in favour of harder ones (e.g. "løb" -> "løp", "kage" -> "kake").

Most of them, incidentally, reducing the similarity with Danish...

Norwegian changed via a language reform a few decades ago. "Fem og sytti" used to be the norm (we inherited some of the Danish rules with the reverse numbers, but not the "halvfjerds" bit (which is effectively "half and four times 20")), and was still common well into the 80's-90's. I learned the new form at school, but picked up the old form from my parents.

taking the opportunity to say that the most voted answer in stackexchange is wrong for Greek, in Greek for example 175 is εκατόν εβδομήντα πέντε (one hundred seventy five)

The Dutch get numbers “backwards,” too. My poor daughter makes mistakes with writing numerals all the time. Like, writing “27” for tweeënzeventig. Sigh. She will learn eventually. I’m sure the mental challenge just makes people strong here, like the bicycling in the freezing rain.

Stupid is debatable here. Computer processors also sometimes tend to use little endian numbers instead of big endian numbers. Germans and us Slovenians just seem to prefer attention to detail and put the most significant digit of a two digit number on the second place.

ZRC-SAZU might have some etymologycal answers.

On that note I notice that I usually misspell two digit numbers in Slovene. For example when writing a number, I usually write the right digit before the left when writing from dictation. Sometimes when I am thinking about a number I tend to say it the other way around, petindevetdeset instead of devetinpetdeset, even though I am a native speaker.

Even more loyal than the French to the ancient vigesimal counting system are the Basque[0] and the Welsh[1].

Traditional Welsh has constructions as:

- 16: un ar bymtheg ("one on five-ten") - 18: deunaw ("two nine") - 41: deugain ac un ("two twenty and one") - 71: un ar ddeg a thrigain ("one on ten on three twenty")

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_numerals

> I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system.

do so and especially blame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emper... to whom Fibonacci dedicated his liber abaci on those fancy new numbers back then.

They must have messed it up introducing that to german day-to-day use. They did it in parts arab-ordered (spoken), half reading order, where sensible would have been right-to-left one digit after the other. So you wouldn't even have to count upfront.

In Czech, both variants are possible. The German one is less frequent, though.

Fortunately nobody's going to use the reverse variant when dictating phone numbers.

In Dutch it is “honderd vijf en zeventig” (one hundred five and seventy). So the same as in German. Do we actually know the origin or reason?

One hundred Five and Seventy is middle endian, neither big nor little.

The only other example I can think of is the american date system

Do they all say the "one" explicitly? In Dutch, it's "hunderdvijenzeventig", (hundred five and seventy), without the "one". That "one" is slightly more likely to be used with thousands, and a lot with millions.

My understanding is that was the way in Serbian-Croatian but it died out. I personally knew people born in early 1900s talking like that. But I can be wrong: it could be just Autro-Hungarian influence.

Any real data on this?

Then you also have Slovenian dialects, where the number order is different again i.e. Prekmurscina - stou sendeset pet.

I'm surprised Hungarians don't say 7 times 5 squared,

French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen)

Same for Dutch.

Honderd-vijf-en-zeventig. Hundred five and seventy.

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