Use Chinese to get the least amount of syllables.
Using fewer syllables to express numbers
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#12Use Chinese to get the least amount of syllables.
Very true, worst case is 2n-1 syllables for n digits.
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#13This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
That reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my "flowstate" playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat with polyrhythms that caught my ear. I tried counting along and realized the primary beat is in 7/8, and in confirming it found myself counting, "one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, one,...".
1. https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbK...
2. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#14This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
Given all of music's esoteric conventions and historical vestiges, I'm surprised they don't zero index. Octaves divided into thirds and fifths, who decided that was ok?
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#15This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup:
MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC
There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive load of saying it. So native Chinese speakers are much better at it than Spanish.
English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable ... except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause a massive amount of good, when summed over all the times people have to remember numbers.
The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-compatible way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just commit to pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word as se--n), and eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation and codified as standard. As long as the listener is expecting a number there, they will automatically fill in the missing sounds and parse it as a 7.
Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or sen."
Who's with me?
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#16This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
I was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I never had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted that high), it just gets two half-duration notes compared to the others. NBD
Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's wrong with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we would did one eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision, but I forget the triplet division.
The drummers all seemed to have a common syntax for different note length patterns without numbers, which you could probably drop in between numbered beats too.
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#17This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
It helps to count from a as either zero or one (use “o” as zero then) rather than a as ten. Won’t help you with hexadecimal compatibility if you take the former but it should overcome the brain obstacle, and scales up to x/26ths at least.
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#18This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup: MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive load of saying it…
Sen’s good to me!
Re: Using fewer syllables to express numbers
#19This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be e…
I was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I never had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted that high), it just gets two half-duration notes compared to the others. NBD Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's wrong with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we would did one eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision, but I forget the triplet divisio…
Because that's for half-time!