German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.
Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
>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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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)
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 (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.
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".
>>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.
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).
> 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.
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'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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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?
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.
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".
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?
"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.
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”
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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>
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa).
Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."
Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.
As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.
English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences.
I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.
I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.
>As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.
I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers
It forces you to stop and parse the numbers because you need to invert them in your head. For me, it's the same effect as writing something down because your brain needs to process it.
> (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.
German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".
Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.
Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to 20, and then start saying “one”, “two”, until I get to thirty to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word for 21, 22, etc is “one-twenty”, “two-twenty”, etc, rather than “twenty-one” etc.
>Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too.
Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system, but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up.
Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness with the other party before the dictation starts.
So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs quickly.
Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to dictate it digit by digit and call it a day.
So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more problems than it solves.
Sounds like you just have to get used to the endianness. It’s actually more consistent; in English, you say four-teen but also twenty-four. In German, they picked the way that is most logical for counting, and stuck with it throughout.
In theory, yes, yet my adult brain cannot process correctly decoding this reversed order quickly, under pressure, over the phone in writing, even though I learned to be fluent in German. I guess you have to grow up with this system so it imprints on your subconscious from an early age, else, if you grow up with another system, and need to switch later in life, it's game over.
Learning this number system is easy, but under pressure over the phone, this reverse pair system falls apart quickly as you tend to write the first digit you hear instead of waiting for the full pair, which is why it's not used in military/critical radio transmissions, because it opens the gates to many errors and proves the system is broken for anything else than casual private use.
I can say that struggle is not universal: I learned German as an adult, and don't struggle with writing down numbers I hear spoken. In fact, I'd never even thought about it being hard.
Every once in a while I say a number backwards (like once or twice a year), but I usually catch myself half-way after spitting it out.
The system is not broken. It works for tens of millions of people, including over the phone. You’re just not wired for it. Welcome to living in your second language!
I will say that even an adult brain can adapt to foreign ways. It does get easier, though in the process you lose something of your original language.
>It works for tens of millions of people, including over the phone.
Except it doesn't work well, as proved by the fact that this system is not used in the military since even top comment in this thread where a German agrees that even he gets confused by numbers in pairs over the telephone and as proven by the fact that Norway transitioned from the "German" way to the "English" way precisely to fix this issue.
I see you're very defensive about your culture/way of doing things, but just because some linguistical quirks exist to date in some languages, is in no way poof that they are good or that it works well, it's just proof that inertia is very strong as these issues get grandfathered in over time since transitioning to something better is too expensive for entire countries to make (look at why the imperial system is still used even though it's inferior to metric).
And for some countries/cultures, introducing certain linguistical quirks on purpose and keeping them was, and still is, a matter of national pride and differentiation between their culture and other very similar cultures (see French vs Belgian French vs Canadian French vs Swiss French, or German vs Austrian German vs Swiss German), so changing something for the better would be admitting something was wrong all along in their culture and would definitely face backlash from conservatives and purists, though Norway did the change successfully from the "German" way to the "English" way of speaking pairs of numbers in order to fix the confusion issues I mentioned.
We say ‘fourteen’ but not ‘four and ten’. Fourteen comes out as one word, like eleven. If ‘fiveforty’ were a word it would be easier to process as one word instead of five and forty which tends to be processed as two words.
Vierzehn and Vierundfünfzig are single words in German, but separate words in English. "Fourteen" (four and ten) being a single word is actually strange in English because the language normally splits words like these.
English has decided to use single words up to 20. Other European languages stop at 100. Both are arbitrary and right or wrong in their own way.
The English word would be "five and forty" because "fiveforty" would probably mean 200 going by traditional English (in the same say "four score and seven" means 4*20+7, not 24+7).
I’d say that the teens having a different structure in English is also weirdly out of place, not that the German counting makes sense. Having a structure where you always count from highest to lowest, and in the order you would write down the number, just makes more sense. It’s always been weird to me that we have unique words for the tens numbers in English.
>since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up
Somewhat reminds me of typical hexdump representation, where even if data has little-endian bytes, nibbles inside each byte are still ordered big-endian.
But it's the same in English up until the number 20. 16 for example, six-ten. The English just count differently after 20. But I could imagine "four and seventy" for example.
Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying “it’s ten for half five” means it’s 4:20. (I think?) I’m really not sure I’ll ever have a solid understanding.
Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.
There are so many ways to say this in German and we mix it all the time, though some ways are more prevalent in certain areas. I'm leaving out the 'regular' version of just saying the numbers and such and there's also the fact that depending on situation (or how you feel that very second) you'll just say 4:20 or 16:20.
4:05: 5 past 4
4:10: ten past 4
4:15: quarter past 4
4:15: quarter 5
4:20: ten to half 5
4:20: 20 past 4
4:30: half 5
4:35: 5 past half 5
4:40: 10 past half 5
4:40: 20 to 5
4:45: quarter to 5
4:45: 3 quarters 5
4:50: ten to 5
5:00: "full"
I'm sure I missed some from parts of Germany I've never lived in/been to.
Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um". Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not important or implied by context, which you can't do if you just say the numbers.
EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".
In some regions it's (4:15) "Viertel nach vier" while it's also "Viertel fünf" because 4:45 is "Dreiviertel fünf", while in those some regions it's then "Viertel vor fünf".
(Personally, I only use Viertel, halb and Dreiviertel, otherwise it's just "siebzehn Uhr zehn" or something.)
I used an English "translation" instead of the German words for the audience here to understand better. What you mention is true and part of my list already e.g.
Note that to an English-speaking person, this is wrong, as "half 5" means 5:30. I once tried to explain that logic to a few Brits, in that the German "half 5" means "half [of the hour from 4 to] 5" instead of "half [past] 5", but to no avail.
Well this happens if you try to show what Germans say in another language ;)
So "halb fuenf" is "half 5".
Same with the "full" for "voll" and for "um" I gave up. No idea how to say that "in English". Or for that matter "4 Uhr 5" for 4:05. "4 o'clock 5" doesn't quite do it, though I guess it's the closest one might come lol!
There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote out numbers the same was German does.
The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her
purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find:
"About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation, although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current that it's totally understandable in a way.
When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn. I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these things I never got to learn this language, my brain just refused to memorise these rules :/
Opened this thread to say exactly this. It wasn't a problem for me before I started using English regularly, but in the past few years, I've been getting German numbers wrong more and more often. It's just so confusing and I have to consciously think about it every time.
There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German.
I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find:
About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.
I was at school in the north of England (Yorkshire) in the late 1970s/early 80s and there were a few schoolteachers, and some old folks, who still spoke this way.
Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still traumatized growing up with this problem.
In Dutch it is the same way. We even have another word for billion. Billion in dutch means 1000x more than the English version. Compounding is translated as combined interest.
English has million and milliard [0], but American English preferred the short scale and that has had more influence over the language. The UK only officially switched over to the "American" system in 1974.
Many European languages have the long scale, English is the odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still classify that as a European language.
Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?
We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual digits for large numbers in any language.
> Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?
Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems. And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more logical the way it is in English or other languages.
Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021) and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later with all its advantages.
ISO-date-format is only better for sorting. But for writting, the german format is far better, because it's written in order of priority and optionality. This is of course less relevant with computers today, but even for reading it still applys.
I do wonder why you care about optionality and priority and what those even mean and how it's better in any way. I don't think it's better at all. It's different.
You remind me of a website I found way back for "learning French as a German". The site was actually pretty decent. But then it started teaching you the numbers and the clock and it started off with how the French way of saying numbers and the time is so much more logical and better than the German way. I closed the site immediately and never opened it again and I did not continue learning French at that time. Stopped right then and there.
Priority and optionality do not help with parsing written dates in an internationalized context. And that is true before computers as well.
2021-02-03 is easy to parse as the 3rd of February 2021 because there's no country on earth that uses this date format to mean the 2nd of March 2021, otherwise it wouldn't help at all.
I'd say that they both depend on context. Let's imagine the two of us are talking about "going camping this month". Year and month are optional. If we're talking about "going camping later this year" the year and day are optional "let's go in February". Let's say we're trying to figure out whether to "still go camping this year or next year". Now day and month are optional.
Your last paragraph is a strong argument for the American system of month/day/year. Days lose most of their relevance unless they are in the current month, so month-first is much more logical and better, because it gives the mind the necessary accuracy without the useless precision. And furthermore…
Just kidding. Month-first is as crazy as camping in February. I’m only used to it because I’m American. Getting us to switch to day/month/year seems more confusing than switching to year-month-day, because the latter is different enough to remove all ambiguity when reading. 06/08/2021 could be June 8 or August 6, but 2021-08-06 is clear since (to my knowledge) no one has ever used “year/day/month.”
As you say, this all really applies to full written dates only, since conversation relies much more on context anyway. You are forgiven if you stopped reading this comment before now :)
Ok, so in a CS sense, why would prepending be better than appending for numbers? If there is a difference (imo there isn't because of the way we chunk thinking), but for counting appending is probably better as the significant part is first and non significant last?
Same with dates, isn't it better to see the more significant info upfront? You are more likely to be confused about which day it is than which month, and about which month than which year it is.
I was a bit unsatisfied by the top answer which mostly seemed to be a reaction to the connotations of the word ‘backwards’ rather than a discussion of the history which was tacked on at the end.
I think the answer is that languages didn’t traditionally have base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting, and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think, 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think). So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1] question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new arithmetic system and people don’t really notice the vestiges of the old systems much.
[1] I don’t want to say that the question is bad but rather that without the historical context it seems like a question more specific to German than something like “why do adjectives come before the noun in English and after it in French” which ends up with an answer that is roughly general history plus “that’s just how it happened”.
I personally liked the reply further down the stack that said the German order is more useful in context of counting. You put the digit that changes with every count first and the one that stays the same for a while second (or mention it only when it changes). Because you don't typical count methodically like this if the number of things counted is large, this system only obtains for two-digit numbers. This is just a hypothesis, but I thought it was the most interesting answer.
I do the same thing in English, especially when counting to estimate time. I'm not thinking "twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two" I'm thinking "twenty, -one, -two'.
I think I prefer English's ordering for that. When I say "twenty, -one," it sounds like twenty-one, but as it's the twenty-first item that's not terribly confusing. Were it "neun-, zwanzig" it sounds a bit more like "neunundzwanzig."
I suppose that problem just moves to English if you're counting down, though. shrug
All the top answers are similarly awful, just smug bleating and ignoring the question. If someone doesn't know the etymological history, they shouldn't say anything!
Used to be like that in Norway. Some older people will still say "two-and-forty", "eight-and-seventy", instead of "forty-two", "seventy-eight", etc.
In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.
This change was called "The new counting method", and describes how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.
Sound a bit inconsistent - why weren't 10 - 20 also changed? Would have been great to have a language that's consistent all the way through as far as counting is concerned :)
I have nowhere enough knowledge in linguistics to properly explain this, but numbers between 10 and 20 have their own unique pronouncement which sound quite incorrect if inverted. Not too different from English, 10,11,12 have their own endings, while 13 to 19 end with a "ten" - similar to the English "teen". But saying "three-and-ten","four-and-ten" etc. doesn't sound right at all, in our language.
It's after this that you get "twenty-one, twenty-two, ... " and up to "ninety-nine" - which can also be pronounced "one-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, ..." up to "nine-and-ninety".
I wish we just said 'ten-four' etc. instead of 'fourteen' which sounds almost exactly like 'fourty'. Especially over the phone someone could easily mistake one for the other
Back when the Spanish had driven the Moors south monks were picking over the wonderful libraries they had left behind, one of the treasures they discovered was what we now call arabic numbers - but they screwed up, they took the numbers as they saw them whole into their writing system. They took numbers meant to be written in a right to left writing system into a left to right system without reversing them.
Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in business - when you add numbers together the result can be written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space for the answer to fit into.
But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness - took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the original arabic way of doing it was right
Counterpoint: when talking or skimming text, the exact number is often not especially important to most of the audience, but the most significant digit or two are.
If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.
To know the magnitude of the most significant digit, you have to scan the whole number anyways. Looking for this info at the end of the number would be just as natural if you were used to it.
I'm no historian, but that explanation doesn't make sense to me, for two reasons:
* Pre-decimal numeral systems in use at that time (Roman/Greek/whatever numerals) were already written biggest-left to smallest-right, and had been so for more than a thousand years.
* Arabic numerals were invented in India, and Indian languages are written left-to-right.
On the other hand, network byte order is big endian, so now we typically have a little endian devices converting to and from big endian to talk to each other.
Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.