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Counting in the wrong language

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Re: Counting in the wrong language

#61

Post by thaumasiotes »

julesnp wrote: post #40
omarhaneef wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Caesar and Augustus didn't insert those months, they were renamed from Quintilis and Sextilis in their honour. The reason for the discrepancy in names is due to the fact that March used to be the first month of the year. It was changed to January hundreds of years before Caesar came along, so the naming scheme was already 2 months off by that point.

> March used to be the first month of the year. It was changed to January hundreds of years before Caesar came along

Depends on your perspective. In the US (really, in Britain), this change occurred during the lifetime of George Washington, who arguably lived hundreds of years after Caesar.

;p

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

ajuc wrote: post #21
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), "poniedzia…

Ancient Greek month names usually identify a holiday that happens that month. The question of how different cultures name the months is interesting in its own right.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#63

Post by ajuc »

Swizec wrote: post #46
ajuc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), "poniedzia…

In Slovenia we used to have the old Slavic names for months, but somewhere around my or my parent’s generation they completely died in favor of roman months. My grandpa is still fluent in them, my parents knew about them and probably knew how to use them once upon a time, I know them as something you see on very old calendars and a curiosity we learned about in kindergarten. All I remember is that my birthday month,…

That's the thing with moving the months back and forth :), in Poland listopad is November, and October is październik (comes from paździerz (chaff?) - the husks of grains separated by threshing it).

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#64

Post by thaumasiotes »

hervature wrote: post #43
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…

French speaking Canadian, I still say soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, and quatre-vingt-dix.

Wait, is it quatre-vingt or quatre-vingts? Is there a context that would distinguish the pronunciation of those two?

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#65

Post by thaumasiotes »

ajuc wrote: post #16

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…

> when English speakers say things like "twelve hundreds" for numbers between 1000 and 2000

We do that in every other range too. It would be completely normal to read 3700 as "thirty-seven hundred".

In what I assume is a related phenomenon, long numbers can be read out in digit pairs rather than single digits (say a PIN code 3742 - "thirty-seven forty-two", as opposed to "three seven four two"), though the digit pairs idea breaks down when a 0 is present.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#66

Post by QuercusMax »

omarhaneef wrote: post #35
QuercusMax wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, you are correct: 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.

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.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#67

Post by thaumasiotes »

Razengan wrote: post #30

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 inp…

I have read about what may or may not be a hypothetical example of a shepherd who "counts" his flock by matching sheep passing through a gate with stones put into or taken out of a bag. This is enough to let you know when the number of sheep is wrong, though you won't know what the number is.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#68

Post by thaumasiotes »

gumby wrote: post #49

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…

> 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.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#69

Post by TheCoelacanth »

QuercusMax wrote: post #66
omarhaneef wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, you are correct: 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.

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.

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

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#70

Post by [deleted] »

Jtsummers wrote: post #31
omarhaneef wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They were not inserted, they were renamed. The year began in March, so the names of September-December make sense within that context. The start of the year changed later, making the names incorrect.

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