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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of seeing a video about a demolition of something using explosives. The person was UK military and the person counted down "10..9..8..7..6.. .. 4..3..2..1..fire" They omitted 5 because supposedly it may sound like fire (as in shoot or do the thing now!).

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From other comments it sounds like there are similar problems in more than one language, which I suppose is not surprising since the low counting numbers in many languages are short words and so have a higher chance of sounding like other short words.

I suggest switching to a non-number sequence with at least the end word not being short. My suggestion:

  drummers, pipers, lords, ladies, maids, swans
  geese, rings, birds, hens, doves, partridge

For extra safety, such as if the countdown is over a noisy communications channel or in a noisy environment, those words could be used in phrases so that even if a word gets garbled it will be easy to tell were the speaker is in the sequence:

  drummers drumming, pipers piping, lords a-leaping,
  ladies dancing, maids a-milking, swans a-swimming,
  geese a-laying, golden rings, calling birds,
  french hens, turtle doves, partridge in a pear tree

Or "So no one told you life was gonna be this way" -> Ignition! /s

Same thing here in German military where instead of saying "zwei" because it might sound like "drei", you say "zwo".

It's quite useful even though its a small problem compared to all those problems which happen because of the way you read numbers above 20. "Twenty one" becomes "one and twenty". It's not as bad as French but still a pain and I've seen Germans mixing it up also.

When I was in 4th grade in Germany in the 90ies, the teacher once asked a classmate of mine to come to the blackboard. She asked her to write thirty-one ("einunddreißig", or "one and thirty"). She wrote "13", and the whole classroom exploded with laughter.

I guess this is how you instill math phobia in children.

I was born in Poland and we moved to Germany when I was a kid. As a child I learned it quite easily (and fortunately I was on a school full of migrant children - today you would call it "Problemschule" here in Germany, I guess - so nobody laughed at me), but my parents still don't get used to it after more than 30 years and struggle with it on a daily basis.

I'm a native German speaker and I have very strong feelings about this because it still trips me up when transcribing number groups by ear. If you ask me to write something down, spell out every digit individually so I don't have to pause every time to find out if you are going to say e.g. "drei", "dreißig" or "dreiundzwanzig". And for the love of god don't say "und" (and) before the final group either. But then again, even three digit groups pose problems (especially when the final group has fewer digits) - is the pause in "einhundert ... dreiundzwanzig" because it's two numbers or because you hesitated?

https://zwanzigeins.jetzt/

As an American South(east)ern kid, I was convinced either my ears were broken or I was dumb, because I couldn't understand how to count syllables in a word.

I understood the method the teacher explained...

... but I would always come up with the wrong number when listening in testing.

I finally asked my mother, who informed me that it's just the southern accent throwing me off, and the word 'that' shouldn't actually be pronounced the way my teacher was ('tha-yat').

So I feel childish academic bewilderment through no fault of their own. :(

I still remember confidently explaining to our teacher that the grammatical choice was always the one that sounded right, and being taken aback when she said other kids grew up where that rule of thumb wouldn't work.

In recent years I have seen a number of arguments break out in a game that requires single syllable answers. It is fascinating to see the disagreement over words like "orange" and several others I never would have imagined.

Learning German as a foreign language, that was one of the painful aspects. Also, who thought it was a good idea to have /dreißig/ sound so much like /dreizehn/? Anyway…

I mean, who thought it was a good idea that "fifty" and "fifteen" should sound so similar?

Yes indeed. This tripped me up occasionally when I was learning English as a foreign language as well!

We should just stop the whole teen thing and say it like we do everything else. Maybe onety five.

A tangentially related interesting note is that in German zwo also meant two, and so did zween. In old German some numbers were gendered and zwo is the feminine form. The only form that is used today "zwei" is the netuer form. Some languages still have this feature, for example in Russian "two" are два (m+n) and две (f). So this change is (technically) grammatically correct. English also had something similar (cf. twain).

I’m German and I never knew this! Thanks!

Zwo is still common today, because it's the word for two in some German dialects. The military adopting zwo would be similar to the American military adopting "y'all," a word that's commonly used and universally understood.

You're right, in southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria (?) it is still widely used in everyday life. It's interesting how northern dialects "choose" zwei while the southern ones preferred zwo. Also, IIRC in some regions the (few) elderly still use all three with their original grammatical rules.

It's definitely not common in Austria, and I also haven't heard it in Germany (outside of a "clarity of communications" context on the phone). Bavarian (which is close to many Austrian German variants) would use "zwoa", which sounds quite different too.

In Franconia, we use "zwo", "zwä" and "zwei", but it might just be very local to the small towns in my area.

As a non-native speaker, I've used it a couple of times at a bakery to make sure I don't get too much of what I'm asking for.

Doesn't help when I _do_ want three of something though...

In Croatian (and possibly other related languages) the number two (dva), like one (jedan), declines according to gender and case

Jedan prozor, jedna jabuka Dva prozora, dvije jabuke

Another unrelated quirk in Croatian (and I don't which other related language) is that with numbers 2, 3, 4 you use the genitive singular and with higher numbers the genitive plural

Tri prozora, tri jabuke, tri kune Četri prozora, četri jabuka, četri kune Pet prozora, pet jabuka, pet kuna (notice the -a ending)

I learned that when I wrote some software that converted numeric values in textual form. I never noticed the rule despite speaking correctly (born in a croatian family but I didn't attend school there so I only picked up the language by listening family members, reading tv subtitles and books).

I wonder if an average Croatian is aware of that plural forming rule or they just do the right thing without noticing.

Slavic languages in general seem to have retained this case and gender dependent declination of numbers, making them rather difficult to learn. For example most languages on this list [1] have complex declension tables for the number two.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B0

But it only works for numbers 1 and 2 and goes away for bigger numbers.

Probably a remnant of the dual case of Proto Indo European

I believe that's why in some contexts you'll hear "niner" rather than "nine" ti differentiate it from "five".

Also why ships use "port" to mean the left side. It was formerly "larboard" which sounds an awful lot like "starboard",

Similarly, the names of the months June and July sound similar in German (Juni and Juli), both ending in an ee sound, so when talking over the phone (or radio) the latter is often pronounced with an aye sound instead.

German also has a "phonetic alphabet" (i.e. nouns and proper names used to spell out letters over the radio) similar to the NATO phonetic alphabet. There are actually multiple because they differ between Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Germany also has two separate standards (of course): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchstabiertafel#Deutscher_Spr...

Most Germans know some of the postal alphabet (or an impromptu variation on it) because it's the older of the two. It's also worth mentioning that the postal alphabet was revised by the Nazis to eliminate "Jewish" (i.e. Biblical) names like Samuel, Zacharias and Nathan. Some of them were restored but that's how we ended up with Samuel/Siegfried, Zacharias/Zeppelin and Nathan/Nordpol. I'd say there's an 90% chance when spelling out a word or name over phone the other person will understand the postal alphabet and a 10% chance they'll be confused what you're doing.

In French banks, to avoid costly confusion, traders use the words "septante", "octante", and "nonante" in use in the French-speaking part of Belgium instead of "soixante-dix", "quatre-vingt", and "quatre-vingt-dix" (sixty-ten, four-twenty, and four-twenty-ten).

I don't know about French banks, but belgians don't say "octante", seems to be a common misconception! They say "quatre vingt", like the French. Swiss don't either, it's either "quatre vingt" or "huitante"

Indeed, I stand corrected!

I still think that "octante" was used on the trading floor, but it was more than 10 years ago, and I was not trading myself...

There are a couple of papers comparing language in children’s numerical ability and performance (particularly speed and accuracy). [1]

The theory espoused was simpler and quicker languages like Chinese (well at least the Chinese number system with quick mono-syllabic base ten based counting) resulted in faster computing ability with fewer errors than English with specialized words like eleven and eighteen rather than “tenty-eight”. The more exemptions to simple logic the slower and more error prone computing was for humans. French on this metric was at the bottom of the pile with polysyllabic non-simple words like quatre-vingt-dix.

I like the idea of Walloon or Fribourg French counting being a sort of high frequency trading hack for people of the 19th century with shorthand like “ûtante.”

[1] While not the paper I was looking for, this one + it’s reference section gets the point across: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0273...

Thanks, very interesting! It took watching my children having to learn French numbers to realize just how difficult (and unnecessary) it was. Then you get used to it and it becomes second nature. I wonder if the added difficulty persists into adulthood...

I've seen English radio comms use "niner", presumably to make "nine" and "five" easier to distinguish on a noisy channel.

In English the military can say "niner" instead of nine esp on the radio to avoid confusion with "five"

I heard it was due to NATO and coincidentally german military. Where nine sounds like nein, so they change it to niner to avoid any potential confusions in case nato units need close cooperation.

Yeah this is standard practise in the UK armed forces/EOD teams. Source: spent time with No. 5131 Squadron in Akrotiri.

You mean Squadron No. .131 no? /s

Five frei!

Oh the nice folks with the RC-135s!

We all know that "starboard" and "port" refer to a ship's right and left, respectively, when facing forward. But it used to be that the "left" word was "larboard". That's close enough to "starboard" to cause a lot of confusion, leading to the change to "port".

With things like this, you wonder how many times things got accidentally blown up early before people decided to just change the way we say numbers in that context.

sometimes also 'niner' instead of 'nine' for similar reasons.

In standard aviation phraseology it's "fife" for the number five and "niner" for the number nine, to avoid confusing between them.

ICAO standard prescribes "fower" as four (making it two syllables), as well as all the others that have been cited (tree/three, fife/five, niner/nine).

They used to say fiver instead, as well

Is that meant to sound less like “fire”??

That sounds even more like "fire"!

I bet they didn't.

I am not claiming it was standard, only that it was used. You can hear it in old WWII footage.

No, fiver is occasionally used by beginning aviation students though in confusion (DAMHIK).

And „tree“ instead of „three“.

You sure that wasn't just an Irishman doing the countdown?

„The ICAO, NATO, and FAA use modifications of English digits as code words, with 3, 4, 5 and 9 being pronounced tree, fower (rhymes with lower), fife and niner. The digit 3 is specified as tree so that it is not pronounced sri; the long pronunciation of 4 (still found in some English dialects) keeps it somewhat distinct from for; 5 is pronounced with a second "f" because the normal pronunciation with a "v" is easily confused with "fire" (a command to shoot); and 9 has an extra syllable to keep it distinct from the German word nein "no". (Prior to 1956, three and five had been pronounced with the English consonants, but as two syllables.?“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#Pronu...

Jamaican?

Tangentially related, when I was on the rowing team in college the coxswain commonly replaced ‘seven’ (the only two syllable number in the 1-10 range) with ‘save’, to maintain a smooth cadence for counting 10 strokes.

And of course, in Norway, “fire” is literally the word for four!

In Dutch, the word for four is also the word meaning "celebrate."

I feel like this would make a nicer confusion however :)

This reminds me of how they say 幺 (yāo) instead of 一 (yī) to avoid confusion in the Chinese military.

Fun side effect: the awkward pause in the sequence also makes me pay more attention to the countdown.

the number 1 in Mandarin Chinese is usually pronounced "yi" which can be mistaken for the number 7 ("qi"). so in certain contexts, e.g. reading out a phone number, it would be pronounced "yao" instead.

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