
Counting in the wrong language - respinal
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be-counting-in-the-wrong-language
======
otikik
I thank the French for the metric system. But their numbers between 70 and 100
are bonkers.

70 is pronunced "60 10". 71 is "60 11". And so on until 80, which is
pronounced, obviously, "4 20". 81 is "4 20 1". It goes up to 90, which is "4
20 10". 91 is "4 20 11". The craziness continues until 100, which is,
thankfully, a different word ("cent", instead of "4 20 20", or, dear lord, "60
40"). But in 170 it all comes back.

I think the French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Canada did the
right thing when they replaced all that complexity by dedicated words for 70,
80 and 90.

~~~
seszett
Canada uses the same numbers as France. Only Belgium and Switzerland use other
words for 70 and 90, and just a few parts of French-speaking Switzerland use
_huitante_ for 80, but most say _quatre-vingt_ like in France.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
That's funny. I learned French from a Belgian woman and I called 80 "octante"
until I was formally taught French and switched to quatre-vingt to avoid
sounding like a hick.

Did I somehow come up with "octante"? Is it not used in Belgium, or anywhere
else? It's true that it sounds a lot more Greek (my native language) than
"huitante".

~~~
seszett
Octante was taught for a while in France at the beginning of the 20th century,
but it never really caught on. Old people in Brittany used to use it sometimes
as well, but it has completely disappeared everywhere now. It does sound nicer
and more natural to me than huitante.

Many French people believe that it is used in Belgium and Switzerland though,
for some reason, but as far as I know that's not true (I live in Belgium,
although not in a French speaking region).

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Thanks. At least I know I didn't imagine it.

I make a disservice to Pascale, the first lady who taught me French, and who
was, herself French, by saying it was a Belgian woman who taught me French.
The Belgian lady, Catherine, taught me _most_ of my French but I first started
speaking French with Pascale.

Which is to say, it's possible I learned "octante" from Pascale, although she
was far from old enough to have learned it in the early 20th century.

So I'm guessing "octante" is still used in some French-speaking places,
although not that widely.

And I'll probably sound rather quaint if I use it myself :)

[For the record, I'm Greek but I learned French very early on because my dad
had cousins in the Greek diplomatic corps and he wanted me to get a job there
and he thought French is the language of diplomacy. I was not interested in
that, of course. But at least, thanks to my dad's silly ambitions, I grew up
practically billingual.]

------
ken
A simpler problem is months. The English system uses arbitrary names, while
Japanese/Chinese/Korean just call them "1-month", "2-month", etc.

Even though I grew up with it, I find the English system impenetrable. Quick,
what's 3 months before November? I have to count it out every time. (In mod
12, -3 is the same as +9, so I just count forward 9 months.)

The names of the months are a nice nod to our Roman history but they are a
pain in the rear to use. It's high time to relegate them to second-class
status, like Roman numerals.

~~~
omarhaneef
I just saw this on social media the other day:

Person A: "Isn't it just awful that SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember and DECember
aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months?"

Person B: "They should stab whomever changed that."

(For those who may not know, that is a reference to Julius Caesar who inserted
July, and if you didn't know that you may be interested to know that Augustus
inserted August. Hence we are off by 2 months.)

Edit: Apparently, I -- and the very funny person B -- were misinformed. Jan
and Feb were inserted, and different months were renamed:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar)

~~~
QuercusMax
I'm not sure this is correct; July and August were renamed, yes, but not
inserted. They did steal days from February, which was originally the last
month of the Roman calendar.

~~~
omarhaneef
Ah yes, you are correct:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar)

So Jan and Feb were inserted.

I have to leave the original up as it is because the joke is too good, but I
will leave this note as a correction.

~~~
QuercusMax
It's not so much "inserted", as they just changed which month they considered
the first. The roman first month was March, but it still took place in the
spring.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
They were inserted. Previously the months ran from March to December and the
remaining time didn't belong to any month.

------
cyborgx7
As someone who went to school in spain but at home always spoke german and now
lives in Germany, the number inversion is the bain of my existance
(hyperbole). I can't tell you how many times I have made mistakes because of
it when communicating with people, and how often I have written down number
incorrectly because of it.

At some point I just want to train myself to say it the "right" way, even if
it sounds wrong in german and people will look at me weirdly. But somebody has
to start the trend, right?

~~~
pluma
Fellow German here. I find it extremely annoying when people read out numbers
for me to write down and announce pairs as numbers instead of digits.

If you mean 42 and read out "zwei und vierzig" I will pause and have to figure
out if you meant 240 and you know it. This kind of thing just seems almost
intentionally inconsiderate because of the unnecessary ambiguity.

~~~
mitchty
I'm slightly confused as a native English speaker here.

zwei und vierzig versus zwei hundert vierzig are radically different to my
ears.

The counting thing is annoying but not as annoying as French numbers in my not
so humble opinion. Though I guess English had it at one point with things like
4 score and 7 years ago (a score being 20 years, so 87 years ago)

Guess maybe I'm weird but outside of the "flip last two numbers around in your
brain in German" it never struck me as much more than: Well that's weird,
least its not french numbers under 100 where I have to add mentally so no big
deal.

~~~
brockwhittaker
French numbers are actually quite easy though if you learn even a little bit
of French.

You don’t think of quatre-vingt dix as four-twenties ten, you just think of it
as ninety just like in English.

I suspect the same is true even for native speakers, your brain is going to
pretty quickly map to the actual number it represents rather than the
arithmetic statement.

~~~
nwallin
I'm thirty eight years old. I've been using standard units my entire life.
They just make sense. Eight cups? Oh that's half a gallon, or two quarts.
Eight ounces of melted butter? Oh that's one cup. Probably two sticks unless
it's that bullshit imported European butter, ugh. My indoctrinated brain can't
imagine it any other way. "You want me to add _what_ grams.. _what_? Who
measures sugar by weight?!"

French numbers are the same way. If the only system you've ever used is a
shitty system, the shitty system is the only logical way of doing things.
Human brains are smart, but also dumb. That's actually the point of this
article.

I am slowly training myself to intuit SI units, especially at work. It's
better, and I know that, but it's fucking hard. I'm pretty sure I'll never be
able to be able to replace it for cooking. It's just too deep. Probably the
same as a Frenchman who learned to count in French. Learning to cook with
standard units was coincident with learning to speak. You simply can't
renovate those memories.

They're still bad systems though.

------
agent008t
I suspect the effect of this, in practice, is almost negligible.

What's more interesting is why being good at maths/physics is considered very
uncool in English-speaking countries (not sure about other European ones), but
is actually seen as cool in, say, Russia or Bulgaria or Singapore [citation
needed]. It is not seen as strange or unusual for girls to be better at
science than boys either, possibly because it is not uncool [another citation
needed].

I would say that has a much, much greater impact on outcomes than how numbers
are represented in the different languages.

~~~
vihren
This is a very interesting observation if its real. I am from Bulgaria and I
am a PhD candidate in physics. Whenever I tell someone that, they always say
that its sounds cool and difficult and the next question is: What are you
going to work after that? I guess that physics, at least in Bulgaria is not
considered as a field that you could work in, more as in something you learn
for the sake of knowledge.

Why do you think that in English speaking countries is different than others?
I temporarily currently living in France and I do not have many contacts with
non scientists, but the ones that asked me what I do all found it cool
sounding.

~~~
agent008t
I meant more on the secondary/high school level. From what I read, it seems
almost everyone good at maths/physics that grew up in the US had a miserable
experience in school. The whole "nerd/geek" thing and being near the bottom of
the school hierarchy.

In my experience in Russia, "nerds" were rather those that were extremely
diligent but did not really have passions or interests; being good at science
was actually seen as kinda cool. Sports achievements were not really
emphasized at all.

But it is all anecdotal, and I would like to see some actual studies on this.

------
nkurz
Depending on what you are counting, sometimes "wrong" can be historically
"right":

 _In Swaledale, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, sheep farmers used to, and
some still do; count their sheep in a very curious fashion. Instead of One,
Two, Three, Four... they go, thus: (1)Yan, (2)Tan, (3)Tether, (4)Mether,
(5)Pip; (6)Ezar, (7)Sezar, (8)Acker, (9)Conter, (10)Dick; (11)Yan-a-Dick,
(12)Tan-a-Dick, (13)Tether-a-Dick, (14)Mether-a-Dick, (15)Bumfit; (16)Yan-a-
Bum, (17)Tan-a-Bum, (18)Tether-a-Bum, (19)Mether-a-Bum, (20)Jigget. Having
reached Twenty, they then take a stone [or make a mark upon the ground or a
piece of wood, thus the term 'a score' or 'twenty'] representing the Twenty
sheep that they have counted; and if they possess more than Twenty sheep, they
go for another twenty:_

 _Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Another Twenty, another stone. Yan, Tan,
Tether, Mether, Pip... Again,Twenty, again another stone._

Jake Thackray 'Molly Metcalfe' 1971

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI)

------
ajuc
As a native Polish speaker it was very strange to me when English speakers say
things like "twelve hundreds" for numbers between 1000 and 2000. Nobody in
Poland ever says that because we don't separate 200 into 2 words "two hundred"
we say "dwieście" (which comes from two hundreds, but is significantly changed
and considered separate word not 2 words joined). It sounds to us like "4
twenties" would sound to English people instead of "eighty".

So because of language it's not natural to think of 1300 as 13*100, it's much
more natural to think of it as 1000+300.

But it's still better in Polish than in German ;) At least we don't do mixed
endian like "hundred two and twenty" :)

~~~
nkrisc
> As a native Polish speaker it was very strange to me when English speakers
> say things like "twelve hundreds" for numbers between 1000 and 2000

Minor nitpick but people will say, "twelve hundred" not "twelve hundreds" (at
least in all of my experience growing up in the US). The reason being, you
have eight hundred, nine hundred, (we don't talk about ten hundred), eleven
hundred, twelve hundred, and so on. It's kind of like a continuance of how the
hundreds below 1000 are named.

Interestingly you will hear sometimes "ten hundred" when talking about address
systems where each block increases the address by 100. Such as, "the ten
hundred block of Example street." But I've never heard it anywhere else.

~~~
Zanni
Minor nitpick nitpick: except for years, e.g., I don't remember exactly when
the Magna Carta was signed, but it was somewhere in the twelve-hundreds.

~~~
nkrisc
I'm talking only about the numbers, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, etc. That is,
counting by hundreds on the hundred.

So your point does not contradict mine.

------
mumblemumble
That point about Dutch children and little-endian names for numbers is a fun
little nugget. The complaint is that they're forced to read the numbers
backwards, when the numerals in question are Arabic numerals, invented by a
culture that reads from right-to-left and has little-endian names for numbers.
I would assume that kids who grow up speaking and learning math in Arabic have
no such problems.

~~~
bloak
The fact that so-called Arabic numerals are written left-to-right is perhaps
evidence that the Arabic numerals were invented in India and are called Arabic
in Europe only because Europeans learnt about them from the Arabs.

------
cyberferret
As a kid, I _still_ remember the day that my dad was helping me with my Maths
homework.

On one tricky problem, he unconsciously started muttering the numbers out
loud, and I was surprised to hear him saying them in Tamil (he is from Sri
Lanka, but we spoke only English at home as far as I've known).

I asked him about it later, and he said that in his head, he always translated
the numbers or problems into Tamil, solved them, then translated back to
English to present the solution - because he was taught maths as a kid in
Tamil.

He could still do all that faster than I could in all English!

------
gumby
What an absurd Sapir-Whorfian argument. The English ten words are the same as
the Chinese (e.g. “forty” is clearly “four-tens” with the corners knocked
off). If summing two-digit numbers is slower for some cohort of kids it’s more
likely the school system than language. For example german-speaking kids have
a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but learn their multiplication
tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12 as is customary in English, so can do more
smaller multiplications in their head than folks raised in English.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> german-speaking kids have a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but
> learn their multiplication tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12 as is customary
> in English

I was charmed to learn that the word for a times table in Chinese is 九九乘法表,
literally "nine-nine-multiplication-method-table".

One assumes the table goes up to 9x9.

~~~
gumby
In German they are called “one times one”

------
skrebbel
I'm Dutch, and I've effectively made this change. Our number system sucks
(though not as bad as the Danish one - which is my wife's language so I'm
regularly forced to decipher that mess), whenever someone says a number like
47 out loud, I have to think hard about whether it's 47 or 74.

So I've decided to generally stop doing maths in Dutch. Our company is
international so we all work in English anyway so when I do stuff in eg Excel,
calc.exe etc, I just count in English. When I speak in Dutch, I generally
simply avoid the last digit in large-ish numbers. Eg I don't care what
language I say "250" in, but when I'm speaking Dutch I'd round "252" to "about
250", which is fine enough in most contexts.

FYI fun trivia: Norway fixed this about their language. They used to do what
the Danes do but now it's like in English etc. They not only made up normal
proper words for eg "50" or "90", but also reversed 2-digit numbers, eg "42"
in Danish is "to-og-fyrre" and in modern Norwegian it's "førti-to". That's a
pretty ballsy way to change a language and I'm jealous.

~~~
gpvos
Congratulations on switching your number language. In general, this is quite
hard to do. Even when reading English, which is almost a second native
language to me by now, I still find that I automatically read numbers in the
text as my native Dutch.

------
ummonk
> In other languages, the tens and units of numbers are inverted. For example,
> in Dutch, 94 is written vierënnegentig (or “four and ninety”), and other
> research suggests this may make it harder to do certain mathematical
> processes.

>For example, Dutch kindergarten children performed worse than English
children on a task that required them to roughly add together two-digit
numbers. This was despite the fact they were slightly older and had better
working memory, because Dutch kindergarten starts later than in the UK. But on
nearly every other metric, including counting ability, roughly adding and
comparing quantities of dots, and simple addition of single-digit numbers, the
two groups performed at the same level.

This is rather surprising. I would have guessed that adding numbers verbalized
in little endian order would be easier because it makes carryover much more
natural.

~~~
yabadabadoes
I think the key is "roughly".. They could probably catch errors in the ones
place better (i.e. verify this summation) and that is potentially distracting
in rounding.

Though another issue is that carry right is an exception for the 10s place.

~~~
ummonk
Oh good catch. I missed that it was asking for rough rather than exact
addition. That is the whole point of big endian - that you lead with the most
impactful part.

------
jt2190
> in English, words like “twelve” or “eleven” don’t give many clues as to the
> structure of the number itself... Contrast this with Mandarin Chinese, where
> the relationship between the tens and the units is very clear. Here, 92 is
> written jiǔ shí èr, which translates as “nine ten two”... Psychologists call
> systems like these “transparent”, where there is an obvious and consistent
> link between numbers and their names.

Relatedly, I've been thinking a lot lately about programming style
conventions, and how some people prefer very explicit code while others prefer
implicit. For example, something as "simple" as leaving out the return keyword
where it can be omitted at the end of a function versus leaving it in. The
latter can be called "transparent", whereas the former requires a little
deeper knowledge of the system.

------
Razengan
This brings up a point that has always eerily intrigued me: _Can_ you even
count _at all -without-_ a language?

Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a clump of 5 trees and
knowing it’s 5 without having to “say” “five” in your head.

But try tapping on the desk or clapping your hands and counting how many times
you did it _without_ saying/thinking “1, 2, 3, 4...”

I wonder if associating a transient stream of inputs with a count may be
impossible without mapping it to some other sequence in your head, like
linguistic numbers/letters.

~~~
cwkoss
My evopsych class in college touched on this.

Brains can track a number of discrete objects (from 3 to ~7, depending on
species and maturity). Once we get past this number, brains tends to interpret
it as 'many'. From the studies we looked at, it appears that the brain can
innately count within this number, but reverts to 'many' representation after
it.

Ex. crows can count three people going into an obscured area with food, and
know that once three people have left, it's safe to get the food, as there
aren't any people left.

~~~
Razengan
Wow, so language lets us get past that limit.

And numbers are a computed property, so we don't have to know all the possible
numbers, just the rules:

    
    
        let firstIndex = 0
    
        var nextIndex: Number { return nextNumberBasedOnSomeRules() }
    

And so it's helpful to have a language with a sensible numeric system, after
all. :)

~~~
cwkoss
A similarly interesting study: ability to create sentences using prepositional
phrases, like "left of the red wall", predicts performance on a disoriented
search task.

[https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePos...](https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePosters_Public/Nav_SRCD2011_FINAL.pdf)

------
oefrha
I think one good test of the counting-friendliness of a language is reciting
the digits of pi (the limitation is obvious: only single digits are
considered).

Among the few languages I know, I can easily recite the first twenty digits
after the decimal point in Mandarin within three seconds. In English it’s just
painful, at least for me.

~~~
samwhiteUK
Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious - do you have a way of remembering
them? Otherwise they're all just single digits regardless of language.

~~~
seszett
I never made a special effort for that and I only remember 12 of those digits,
so maybe I'm just using an inefficient way, but I remember them as two-digit
numbers, not single digits.

I don't think I'm alone, the basic value of pi one learns in France is "3 14
16" \- "trois quatorze seize" (historically it was "trois quatorze-cent-seize"
so "3 1416" but it's less used today).

~~~
oefrha
I believe the basic number taught in Mandarin is 3.1415926, which fits in one
second.

------
armagon
This makes me feel better for thinking that the way we write (standard
Western) music impedes understanding of the way modern chromatic music sounds.

And for the same reasons, really. Putting together things like "Four Twenties"
makes sense when you only count to a hundred, and less sense when you need to,
say, express the speed of light or the size of an electron. I'm sure the
musical system made a lot more sense with diatonic sounds, but once you add in
accidentals, you're just retaining backwards compatibility because it used to
work and the then-living people were familiar with it.

------
yesenadam
Improper representations are frowned upon in school, but they have their
place. Once, a niece of mine in kindergarten told me she knew what 3 times 11
was: 33.

I asked "Well then, what's 7 times 11?"

"It's seventy-seven."

"Okay, I bet you don't know what 12 times 11 is."

"Twelvety-twelve", she gleefully replied.

We agreed that twelvety-twelve is a perfectly good number, we know what it is,
but if we were talking to other people we would tell them one hundred and
thirty two – for us, twelvety-twelve is just fine.

– Bill Thurston, _Groups, Tilings and Finite State Automata_

------
jedberg
My wife learned Cantonese as her first launguage and English as her second. I
learned Cantonese in college. It’s way easier to count in Cantonese because it
is so regular.

As a bonus, a native asian language speaker effectively has to learn place
value at a very young age to learn how to count.

My wife learned all of her math skills in English, but she still sometimes
counts in Cantonese. When we play blackjack, if I’m taking too long she’ll
tell me the value of my cards in Cantonese, because she’s adding them in her
head in Cantonese.

It’s just quicker.

------
reportgunner
In Czech they often say "triadvacet" which literally translated means
"threeandtwenty" and I can't help to not think they said 32 every time I hear
it.

~~~
isolli
Interestingly dvacettri is also acceptable :)

------
macintux
This doesn’t surprise me at all.

Obviously not a direct correlation, but I’ve been surprised at how critical my
internal vocalization of words is to my ability to solve a word puzzle game
I’ve been playing recently.

In short, my ability to find a word that matches a pattern of blank letters is
almost entirely dependent on my ability to pronounce those that might fit. If
the word that matches has a pronunciation that doesn’t quite fit the usual
patterns, I’ll have a very hard time recognizing it.

------
tow21
My favourite illogical system is archaic Finnish, where it goes (roughly
translated)

One, two, three, ... Second-one (11), second-two (12), second-three (13), ...
Third-one (21), third-two (22), third-three (23), ...

ie you have an off-by-one error in the tens digit as you are counting.

Modern Finnish retains this for 11-19, but mercifully sanity returns for
numbers above that.

------
tasogare
> Of course, there are many other reasons why children from different
> countries might have different mathematical abilities, including how maths
> is taught and attitudes towards education. It’s normally hard to control for
> these factors when studying people from different cultures – but one
> language offers a fascinating solution.

I read that as: of course, we know there are other possible explanations but
we won’t dive in the research literature and we’ll instead indulge ourselves
in this Sapir-Whorf based article because it’s good click bait.

The only interesting fact presented is that there is a slightly performance
penalty in execution (not result) on some arithmetical tasks that never happen
in real life based on the way to express numbers in subject’s native language.

------
csours
Tom Scott and Why Klingon is Simpler Than Danish.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc)

------
agumonkey
Similar things have been said about Chinese numbering.

------
huguesdk
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten one, ten two,
ten three… ten nine, two ten, two ten one, two ten two,… three ten,… nine
ten,… hundred one, hundred two,… hundred ten one, … two hundred, … two million
three hundred four ten five thousand six hundred seven ten eight

------
Lagogarda
"might" is the word of the day

