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Counting in the wrong language

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Re: Counting in the wrong language

#21

Post by ajuc »

ken wrote: post #12

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…

In Polish months are named after plants that bloom then and weather conditions. Quite poetic to say "I will meet you on the 5th day in the month of linden trees" :)

The funny thing is that other Slavic countries use similar names but some are moved 1 month back or forth because flowers bloom earlier/later there :)

And days of the week are simply numered starting with sunday = "niedziela" (not working day), "poniedziałek" (after not working day), "wtorek" (secondary day), "środa" (middle day), "czwartek" (fourth day), "piątek" (fifth day) and "sobota" (sabbath).

I never remember the names of the roman months and have to count them starting from january.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#22

Post by 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.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#23

Post by efdee »

otikik wrote: post #13

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 bac…

Only 70 and 90. 80 is still 4-20. In French-speaking Belgium, anyways.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#24

Post by seszett »

samwhiteUK wrote: post #8
oefrha wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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).

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#25

Post by bloak »

mumblemumble wrote: post #15

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.

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.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#27

Post by oefrha »

samwhiteUK wrote: post #8
oefrha wrote: post #5

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.

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.

> Otherwise they're all just single digits regardless of language.

You mean single syllables? All syllables are definitely not created equal, some are harder to pronounce than others, and some don’t combine nicely when pronounced side by side.

> do you have a way of remembering them?

I do, but that’s beside the point. s/reciting/reading out loud/ if you wish.

Edit: I see the confusion now. I didn’t mean “remembering” within three seconds, that would be insane for most people.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#28

Post by QuercusMax »

omarhaneef wrote: post #17
ken wrote: post #12

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…

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 mont…

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.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#29

Post by acomjean »

pluma wrote: post #10
cyborgx7 wrote: post #2

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 i…

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.

The number pairing trick is use to not flip numbers.

But I can see how it would be annoying in german.

As weird as the german digit flip is, French I understand is worse with the number names, actually involving math.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#30

Post by 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.

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