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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I tend to just go with whatever the person I reply to uses, or whatever majority usage in the audience I'm talking to is, which is why I used Fahrenheit here despite the fact that I live in Copenhagen and my own thermometers are in C. I'd use the metric system for scientific purposes, but for daily life I'm pretty comfortable with whatever mixture people want to use among such old friends as F, C, pints, oz, mL, cL, stones, kg, lbs, megabytes, mebibytes. They could hardly be weirder than the Danish numbering system!

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How is the Danish numbering system weird? I ask as a curious Dane.

Well there isn't anything weird with the counting or mathematical usage, just the names for them seem not to use a typical decimal system. For example, in English and Norwegian, 75 and 82 are straightforward compounds of "7,5" and "8,2". In English, seventy-five, eighty-two; in Norwegian, syttifem, åttito.

But in Danish, 70 isn't syv-something. Instead it seems it's halvfjerds, which sounds like half a fjerd, except a fjerd is not a number. ;-) And even more confusingly, 50 sounds awfully like half-60.

From what I've read, it used to be "half four twenty" (halvfjerdsindstyve), where "half four" is an archaic way of saying 3½, so 3½ 20 = 70. Which later, I suppose, got contracted into halvfjerds. Admittedly you can just treat them like opaque symbols to memorize, so I doubt anyone thinks of 75 as "5 and 3½ x 20". But the Norwegian numbers seem more orderly...

Ah, yes that is weird once you start thinking about it. As a native speaker I've never given it a second thought, but I can certainly see how it would be confusing.

That's sort-of similar (though even weirder than) French[1], where, where you sometimes count in twenties instead of tens. So instead of sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one, it's (the equivalent of) sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven. And eighty is really four-twenties, so ninety-five is four-twenties-and-fifteen, etc.

Of course, English used to be like this too — thus "three score years and ten". And many languages still retain non-decimalised words for eleven and twelve (and sometimes powers of them, like a gross or mass.)

[1] Well, French French. Swiss French and Belgian French are much more sensible.

We still have halvanden (half second or 1.5), but apparently half third, half fourth, half fifth, etc., used to be common too.

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