What’s going on in Denmark?
It’s base 20 like in France, plus the quirk that we have an ordinal numeral way of saying half integers, i.e. 1.5 is “half second”, 2.5 is “half third”, 4.5 is “half fifth”. So 92 is said as “two and half fifth times twenty”. We’ve since made the “times twenty” implicit for maximum confusion, so it’s just said as “two and half fifths”.
Also, the ordinal numeral system for halves is only really used for 1.5 these days, so the numbers don’t really make sense to anyone. When speaking to other Scandinavians, we often just say “nine ten two”.
Why don’t we just change it to the more sensible system then? Because language is stubborn.
Now imagine moving there as a foreigner from a normal country and someone telling you their phone number! It’s like having a micro stroke.
1.5 is “half second”, 2.5 is “half third”, 4.5 is “half fifth”
Interesting. Regionally, some Germans measure time like this, i.e. “half two” is 01:30 resp. 13:30. (Which is different from English, where people who say “half two” mean “half past two”.)
We’ve since made the “times twenty” implicit for maximum confusion, so it’s just said as “two and half fifths”.
I know very little about Danish, but I learned that Danes slur the middle of most words. So I suspect you actually pronounce even less of the word than you’d write…?
Because language is stubborn.
Belgian French gives me hope.
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[Edited: Usage is not regional]
Regionally, some Germans measure time like this, i.e. “half two” is 01:30 resp. 13:30.
This isn’t regional nor “some”, I never met a German wo doesn’t. Sure, there is “13 o’clock 30” and both are valid but I’d say the default is still the half system.
When it comes to quarters, there are regional differences and it’s a common “ice breaker” or small talk topic when people from all over Germany come together.
So the Danish can do this bullshit with everyday numbers and it’s cool because language , but I mention that it’s 70 degrees outside and everyone starts arguing about metric?
Everything is arbitrary, I’m gonna go build a dresser in multiples of rabbit foot while you all figure something out.
Temperature in fahrenheit is just as arbitrary as celsius. Fahrenheit makes sense from the perspective of human experience while celsius is very relevant to water. It’s really handy if you live in a area with snowy winters. Celsius is standard all around the world, while Fahrenheit is used in a handful of places.
For what it’s worth, the US doesn’t use imperial anymore. It’s “US Customary Units”. It’s mostly a mix of metric and units based on metric. The US uses volts, amps, watts, and seconds which are metric. The inch, by definition, is 25.4mm. I’m not sure how the US gallon (less volume than the Imperial gallon) is defined. Food content is given in calories and grams.
I’m also not sure how temperature is defined. Originally, temperature units were set so that fresh water boiled exactly 180 degrees above it’s freezing temperature. To avoid negative numbers, zero Fahrenheit was set to the freezing temperature of sea ice.
I have to admit, as a French myself I found relief in that discovery. And thank you very much for the explanation.
I was confused by the “2 and” at first, then I realize you put the smallest part of the whole number first. It makes perfectly sense if you count in base 20.
We also have an habit to count in base 12 and half 12 in France. Like “half a dozen” (6) or “one dozen and half” (18), but only for multiple of 6.
I will now say “quatre vingtaine et demie” instead of “quatre-vingt-dix” just to tease my fellow Belgians (who say “nonante” and “septante” instead of “soixante-dix” et “quatre-vingt-dix”)
EDIT: As a matter of fact, I will rather say “trois et demi-cinquième vingt” for 73 because it sounds better. Now I see it.
If I am correct, the 3rd 20 is everything between 60 and 79. The half-3rd 20 is everything between 70 and 79. So 7 and half-2nd 20 would be 37?
How would you say 40, 60 and 80 then ? 2nd 20, 3rd 20 and 4th 20?
30 (tredive) you cited seems to be the exception, as it’s not “halbtots” or something.
Indeed, fyrre (40) is also clearly related to four (or fourth), it only kicks in at 50.
You can recognize the numbers where this system is in place by the ‘s’ at the end, which is a remnant of the “-sindstyve” ending meaning “times twenty”.
If it worked for 30 and 40 they would be “halvandens” and “andens”.
I’ve always found the Danish numbers intriguing. I understand the whole “halvfem-sinds-tyve”- thing and the other ones of similar origin but I can’t wrap my head around “elleve” and “tolv”. Do you remember the origin of those?
Not really, but they’re essentially the same as the German “elf” and “zwölf”, so we probably got them from the same place as them ;)
| # | 🇩🇰 |
|---|---|
| 1 | en |
| 2 | to |
| 3 | tre |
| 4 | fire |
| 5 | fem |
| 6 | seks |
| 7 | syv |
| 8 | otte |
| 9 | ni |
| 10 | ti |
| 11 | elleve |
| 12 | tolv |
| 13 | tretten |
| 14 | fjorten |
| 15 | femten |
| 16 | seksten |
| 17 | sytten |
| 18 | atten |
| 19 | nitten |
| 20 | tyve |
| 21 | enogtyve |
| 22 | toogtyve |
| 30 | tredive |
| 40 | fyrre |
| 50 | halvtreds |
| 60 | tres (threes) |
| 70 | halvfjerds (½fourths) |
| 80 | firs (fours) |
| 90 | halvfems (½fifths) |
| 92 | tooghalvfems (twoand½fifths) |
| 100 | hundred |
In Czech, we say „čtvrt na osm“ (quarter to eight), „půl osmé“ (half of eighth) and „tři čtvrtě na osm“ (¾ to eight) to mean 19:15, 19:30 and 19:45, respectively, so I kinda get it.
Similarly, in German, 🕢=„halb acht“.
TIL that it not French with the weirdest way to count. I still don’t really get the Danish way. Even with your explanation.
It’s not really an explanation, just a table where I leave the linguistically inclined to figure it out. The point is, the “s” at the end is short for “×20” and “half fifth” is short for ●●●●◖ = 4½ (four and half of the fifth).
Ja, ich spreche auch ziemlich gut Deutsch. Ich würde aber lieber die Angelsächser mit meiner Fähigkeit „čtvrt“ (tschtwrt) zu aussprechen beeindrucken.
Funny enough, I grew up saying “quarter of eight” to mean 19:45. It took until my mid-20s to realize its probably a regional thing because, after I left Philadelphia (my home city) and moved to Chicago, everyone thought I meant 20:15.
Oh! In New England “quarter of” is 15 minutes before the hour (19:45) and “quarter after” is 15 minutes after the hour (20:15). That might explain why my colleagues in Alabama were surprised when I left a meeting at 9:45 when I had clearly warned them I had a hard stop at quarter of ten!
Interesting distinction none of us picked up on!
Thats pretty common in terms of time. I’m not going to say something is “half five” to say it coststwo and a half dollars though. I understand that with French and Danish you arent actually doing the math and just think of that string the same way i think of “ninety two” but it’s still difficult to wrap my head around.
Also: the green (at least with English) should be (9 × 10) + 2
English is 90 + 2. Ninety is its own distinct word.
French is similar to English (base ten) but after 60 it gets weird and then at 80 switches to base 20 until 99.
70 in French is 60 + 10 80 and above in French is 4 × 20 + what ever number is needed to get there.
So to say 102 in French, you’d say four-times-twenty-plus-twenty-two.
I don’t believe you.
EDIT: What in the actual fuck. You were right. 😳
102 is “hundred-two” so it’s only weird for 70 “sixty-ten”, 80 “four-twenty” and 90 “four-twenty-ten”…
But the way I learned it each was like it’s own word, even if it’s not. Just don’t think about it too much!
Nobody says huitante in Belgium.
It’s 60, 70, 4*20, 90.
edit: Downvote all you want. If you say huitante in Belgium, everyone will know you’re not from Belgium.
Belgians say Soixante, Septante, Quatre-vingt, Nonante. Even in the dutch language part, that’s how they learn french.
If you say Soixante-dix or Quatre-vingt-dix, everyone will know you’re french and not Belgian. Pretty simple…
Nonante, not neuvante but yes. In Switzerland and Québec too if I’m not mistaken.
I love this topic, keep the comments going! It gets even wilder/weirder when reading historical German monastary documents from the early modern period that sometimes mixed German numerical grammar with latin letters and abbreviations. For example this was a common way to write prices in the early 17th century in my region of study:
xiv C Lviұ f xxv bb iy d
All of this was in early modern German Kurrent (old cursive), of course, and with not always obvious whitespaces inbetween. The letters v and x looked somewhat similar, too, and you better don’t miss the small strikethroughs anywhere in the lower or upper end of a letter which indicated “minus half” (except for the letter capital C which always has it). This is the kind of fun that brings me joy during my day while simultaneously providing the content for nightmares at night.
For some closure:
The short example would read as: (10+(5-1))*100 + 50+((5+3)-0.5) florin, 10+10+5 batzen, and 1+1+1 denari.
And that would translate to a price of 1457 ½ florin (guilders), 25 batzen (silver coin) and 3 denari (pennies).
Am I correct in thinking that this would be a relatively enormous amount of money for a normal person in that time?
Yes, absolutely! My work is related to monasteries. Some of these institutions were large economical organisations with hundreds or thousands of affiliated workers (in addition to the few dozens of actual clergy) stretching hundreds of villages/cities. Monastaries basically were the major corporations of the time. They did handle these amounts of money regularly.
Historical purchasing power for anything before the industrial revolution is hard to approximate. On the one hand because wages were not only payed in money, on the other hand because labor was very cheap and material cost was high - the inverse of today. To illustrate: They did lots of recycling work that would seem fanatical to us today, e.g. straightening old nails, reusing stones and wood from deconstructions, or even excavating and resharpening rotten fenceposts. To add some general and very rough perspective: An unskilled worker/day-worker could expect a yearly wage in the order of magnitude of about 5 fl (guilders) per year for very hard work and long working hours for 6 or 7 days a week (payed daily in non-face-value coins like pennies). However, it was common for wages to include living accomodation and/or food staples (that included wine or beer) - or pay out the worth of these things, separately. A pair of shoes was a valued gift one could give to an unskilled worker on special occasions.
It was a different time with different societal and economical systems in place. Estimated simplifications you might read online (e.g. 1 fl = 50€) are therefor to be taken with a buttload of salt - to the point one might call it a misrepresentation. Then there were the multiple events with increased silver and gold imports from the new world (combined with some greedy/desperate lords reducing the silver share of their coins). This led to multiple changes in the exchange rates between various regional gold, silver and non-face-value coins of the same names, complicating thing even more.
To solve these issues, the prices I named above would be in fictional coins of account, not actual physical coins that were payed. People had to do quite some math when doing accounting - and yes, minor errors happened all the time.
This sounds fascinating. I was always fascinated how complicated life could be in days past. Like how we take decimalization for granted today or the cheap conversion of money and the enormous availability of modern currency (i.e. Paper money and coins).
I once read about coin shortages and how that could impact an entire region. Fascinating stuff.
Do you happen to have book recommendations on the topic of coins or economic history of Europe (or even more specifically the German speaking area)?
It’s a pretty enormous amount of money now. I was thinking that a gold coin was 1oz which would have been an insane amount of money but some research has told me that guilder can refer to several different coins that are between .08oz and .11oz of gold mixed with other precious metals. Ignoring the other precious metals and assuming the lowest gold content 1457.5 guilders is a bit over 116 oz of gold. Gold is approx. $1900/oz so in gold alone that is over $220,000.
Man and here I thought the English system was kinda screwy, where at first it’s in base 12 and base 20 at the same time what with having special unique names for all digits up to twelve, and then thirteen through nineteen are also uniquely weird, then at twenty we decide “man fuck that” and then it’s in base 10 until we repeat that pattern every 100, ie “one hundred seventeen.” Or then we occasionally do stupid things like “seventeen hundred” instead of “one thousand seven hundred.”
It just now hit me that “teenager” is an inherently English construct because that weird partial second decade we have. I’m curious, how does that work in languages? Like, in French they have special words up to 16 and only do “ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine.” You spend seven years as a teenager in England but only three in France.
Germanic languages share this. German has neun, zehn, elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn…
But continues after that. Apart from 11 and 12 the german system is consistent within itself, even if the system itself is kinda weird, English less so.
Edit: What i meant is the difference between ten/teen, whereas German uses zehn (“ten”) to build the “compount numbers”. There is also thir-teen as opposed to three-ten, which isn’t quite what eleven and twelve are, but it’s also not the same as the numbers following it. But others have pointed out that these are pretty marginal differences and i would agree.
Literally every single point listed by @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works applies 100% identically to German. Could you explain how English is less consistent than German?
It’s fascinating how our number systems even evolved. They’ve done studies with remote Amazon tribespeople where they show them a number of dots and ask them how many there are, and found that their words for what we thought were their numbers 1-5 actually translate to more like 1, 2, 3, ‘4-ish’ and ‘many’. Interestingly when they’ve done the same with very young children then they’ve got similar results.
Counting is something that only took off when large-scale civilisations (and the need to pay taxes!) took off - before this there was never really a need to be specific when counting a quantity of more than about 4 or 5. Maths developed as an offshoot of language rather than something distinct and so our counting systems suffer from the quirks that come with this.
In my language(Romanian), the numbers between 11 and 19 are onetoten,(unsprezece) twototen(doisprezece) … Ninetoten(nouasprezece)
There are 3 exceptions: for 11 instead of unusprezece(onetoten) its unsprezece(un/o is used when saying that there is only one of something, but unu is used when counting), for 14 instead of patrusprezece(fourtoten) its paisprezece and instead of sasesprezece(sixtoten) its saisprezece
In Finnish, the numbers 11–19 are (the number for 1–9) + “toista”, lit. “of the second (ten)”. So 11 is yksitoista, “one of the second (ten)”. That system is only used for 11–19. Bigger than that is tens + number, e.g. 21 kaksikymmentä yksi (two tens and one).
The Finnish word for “teen” is “teini”, which is a loanword from English. The native word for a person that’s not a child nor an adult is “nuori” lit. “a young”.
Japanese is 1 (ichi), 2 (ni), …,10 (juu), 10+1 (juu-ichi), 10+2 (juu-ni), …, 21 (ni-juu-ichi)…, 92 (kyu-juu-ni)…, 100 (hyaku)
In Swedish the numbers from 13-19 work similarly. We just add “ton” instead of teen. Teenagers called tonåringar (ton-agers).
TIL a little about Swedish.
I wonder if Swedish and English number words share a history, because I can imagine it started as “three ten” which gets crunched to “thr-t’n” and then properified into “thirteen.”
They’re both Germanic languages, just like Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish and a few others. Same origin. All of them have variations of tre/dre/drei/thir/þre/þrēo (say them with sounds halfway between t and d as the first sound, and you’ll see how similar they are) followed by variations of ten/teen/tin/tan/ton/tien/zehn as a suffix for ten (again, pick a halfway point between t and z and it’s easier to see how similar they are).
In Old English it was þrēotīene ( þ is “th”), and in Old Norse it was þrettán, same as modern Icelandic, so the first common root is even further back, but you can see the similarity. The *hypothesized proto-Germanic root is þritehun. (þriz + tehun.
But, it goes back even further than that. The Romance languages (tres, trois etc) shares the same proto-Indo-European root (hypothesized to be tréyes) for three with proto-Germanic.
The names for numbers are ancient, and though not always recognisable, sometimes recognizable variants pop up even further away than you’d expect. E.g. Pashto (Southeastern Iran) has dre for three, Sanskrit has trí, Indonesian has tri, all of them descendants of the same proto-Indo-European root.
At 40 I still get confused when people say shit like 12 - hundred and 16. I’m like… Is that 12 groups of 100? Is that a 12 with 000 after?
1 thousand, 2 hundred and 16.
But I wasn’t ever a math major or anything.
Even as I typed it, it made sense. But to throw it into a conversation. Makes me less certain.
I think Denmark should stop doing crack.
