121–125 of 125 posts
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…
Does 80 in France have any of the 420 weed connotations?
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…
It could be worse. Norway has two counting systems Modern: 32 = "thirty-two" (similar to English) Old: 32 = "two-and-thirty" (similar to German) The modern system was introduced by the government in the 50s as a requirement from the national phone operator. This was before automatic switches were common, so users had to speak with an operator to patch to the correct destination. They insisted that the old counting me…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the problem is that people read out long numeric sequences in inconsistent ways. Consider this: "sixty-nine" is clearly 69. But when spoken out, especially in a long string of digits (like an IBAN, a banking code) that might be announced as "six, nine" or "sixty-nine" or "sixty...nine" or even "six...ty-nine". So even in English there's some chance of ambiguity whether it is supposed to be 6-9 or 6-0-9 (consider:…
>As for why "neun...und sechzig" is ambiguous: with that weird pause it's not clear if this is still 69 or literally "9 and 60" (which is what the word "neunundsechzig" means), i.e. 9-60. 9 und 60 vs. 9 hundert 60, if you speak quickly then the "ert" part of hund ert is often swallowed, making it more difficult to discern between the remaining "hund" and "und".
The closest I can get to ambiguity by slurring "neunhundertsechzig" is "neun oder sechzig" or "neun, neununsechzig", never "neunundsechzig", and I have to make an effort to speak faster than I normally would even if I was reading out numbers in a hurry. I've also never run into this ("hundert" and "und" being mixed up) in my daily life, so I'm surprised to hear that this is something you hear often.
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 p…
> 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…
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 s…