Finnish is actually 9*10+2
Yhdeksänkymmentäkaksi
Yhdeksän = nine
Kymmentä = of ten
Kaksi = two
Isn’t it mostly 9*10+2? 9 * ty (implying 10) + 2.
Even german does that, although weirdly the way you can’t just write down long numbers reasily one by one: Zwei (2) und ((and) neun- (9) -zig (*10)).
I’m actually impressed by this map. The French speaking part of Switzerland is not only differentiated from the German speaking part, it is also differently coloured than France, since Swiss French has more sensible numbers.
Is this a Michael Hobbes joke?
Note to self: For learning a scandinavian language - learn Swedish instead of Danish.
If you learn swedish, you can speak danish. Just put a hot potato in your mouth
Why do Danes all have a potato in their mouth?
For good luck
That’s four goddamn numbers in a row!
French language uses math to speak numbers if anyone is wondering about France.
Edit: Apparently I wasn’t precise enough for the dude below. It starts at 70 and ends at 99 every time you get to those numbers. De rien, tabarnak.
Not quite. They just have remnants of an old base 20 system that kicks in for specific numbers.
Je le sais, je parle français .-.
Ehh, i’m not giving France a pass either.
The answer to 100 - 8 should not be four twenties and a twelve. We’re counting, not making change.
French counting is bunk. Way, Way, better then Denmark though apparently
the thing nobody mentions is that the 4x20 part became a word that just means 80 in people’s mind, it kinda not literal anymore, but the Swiss and Belgian ways are still better (edit the 4x20+10 is similarly just 90)
e a word that just means 80 in people’s mind, it kinda not literal anymore, but the Swiss and Belgian ways are still better (edit the 4x20+10 is s
And if it was 28 syllables, it would still be 80 in people’s minds. But the words are still four twenty ten eight for what could easily just be nine eight.
I get it, but it is really inefficient for something as oft used as counting.
If it makes you feel better, English is full of crap like that which doesn’t make any sense and I’ll own that as a trash language :)
We can also do 2+90 here in the UK. There’s a nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds” that I think the kids are still learning.
Quatre-vingt douze isn’t incredibly onerous when you use it in practice.
Quatre-vingt dix huit or quatre-vingt dix neuf are definitely more of a mouthful and illustrate the point better.
Yeah France is fine
hard agree i actually think france’s method of counting is pretty intuitive
Agreed. Fourscore and twelve just works (English used to use this, at least in formal speech and writing).
That meme is so lame. 92 in Danish is two and a half fives. The 20 part is old-fashioned and literally nobody has used that since the 1800s.
2 and a half fives’ twentieth = outdated cringe. 2 and a half fives = actually how it is said today.
It’s still a friggin nightmare to get someone’s Phone number verbally, though.
That only makes it worse.
Two and a half fives = 12.5.
More like 2 and half fives. Half five is our word for 90. So in essence we say 2 and 90 but the word 90 is half five.
80 is fours
70 is half fours
60 is threes
50 is half threes
40 is forty
30 is thirty
20 is twenty
10 is ten.
Oh and a 100 is a hundred. So I dunno what happened between 50 and 90, but I’m sure there is a funny story behind that somewhere.
You’re just digging yourself and Denmark into deeper hole. It’s fucked up and you know it
I never claimed otherwise. I’m just tired that this 92 meme is using outdated language (or numbers rather) to make a point that may have been reasonable to make in the 1800s, but not today. Doesn’t mean our number system is any less retarded today. If anything, I’m just adding on to the fact that Danes are notoriously lazy with the Danish language and will cut corners with all words and sentences the same way Americans cut corners when they chop everybody’s name up into bite sized nicknames. For us, though, it’s more like slurring at the end of a word and flat out ignoring letters that are very clearly there in the word.
Woe is the poor asshole who decides to immigrate here and attempts to learn the cancerous gargle that is our language.
That said, it is still the best language to curse in and when used in poetry, it can be downright majestic.
But yeah, our curses are superior to all words in the English language.
My favourite for life will always be kræftedme = cancer eat me - usually uttered in a sentence to underline how pissed off you are and how serious you are about being pissed off.
Denmark = outdated cringe
Just kidding neighbor, I love you all
Found the swede xD ❤️
Let’s grab a rød pølse and some surströmming
edit: evil combo of the year
I’ll bring the kamelåså and we get the party started
Not Danish here… Isn’t that 12.5?
Dane here. No one actively thinks of 90 (halvfems, 2 and a half fives) as a mathematical expression. Is is just a word for 90. So we say 2+90 like Germany.
Would it have been nice if that word meant “9 tens”, yes, but Danish is a just a stupid language where you have to learn a bunch of things by heart unfortunately.
How would you say trump is like Hitler? Do you have to describe the Holocaust in few words within a long ass German style word?
Easy. We often use idioms for comparisons.
One old way would be: “Trump and Hitler are both 2/3 yards from one piece” which means “They’re cut from the same (bad) fabric”.
Fabric was cut in an old measurement"alen" which was 2 foot or 2/3 yards, so simply stating the length would be understood as fabric, similar to how everyone knows that a 2x4s is a piece of wood and such.
Ah yes! I understand the culture fully now!
For a real explanation of this watch this illuminating video.
TL;DW According to the perons, it’s based on counting sheep and from base 20. 1 score = 20 sheep. 2 score = 40 sheep.
To get to 50, you have 2.5 score, but they don’t say “two and a half”. They are quite Germanic and say “halfway to 3” (Germans do this too). So, 50 = half three score.The video also points out that English has (as the hodgepodge of a language it is) yet another remnant of Germanic languages: 13-19 are not “te(e)n-three to te(e)n-nine”, but “three-te(e)n to nine-te(e)n”, just like in German “drei-zehn bis neun-zehn”.
It’s quite easy to mock other languages, but there’s always a reason for why things are the way they are. Think of Chesterton’s fence.
I just tried to say tentyfive like four times in a row and I couldnt speak for 20 seconds after that. Thank you.
This comment makes me so sleepy…
I agree with your broader point about linguistics, but Chesterton’s fence has never sat right with me. Consider the inverse:
This annoying and unnecessary fence is an inconvenience, but since nobody can remember what it’s for, we dare not remove it
I honestly don’t understand what’s insightful about it. It encourages a functional viewpoint that results in you inventing proposed uses for something that is a vestige of an inefficiency. Justifying something useless isn’t curiosity, it’s just masturbation. You should identify how a structure interacts with it’s current environment. There’s a reason functionalism is considered worthless in sociology.
I think the point is more that you should take care to consider why it was put there because it might be something that is not immediately obvious.
You should identify how a structure interacts with it’s current environment.
OK, but what if it was put there to stop something that only happens once every 10 years? Without taking the time to learn this, you might tear it down and then after a few years you’re scrambling to solve a problem that was already solved.
I’m very hostile to excuses for conservatism because they’re often positions to apologize for power structures that have a secondary gain. The point I’m making is you should never approach something that previously existed as if it was beneficial by default. It’s often not and that’s a fallacy as much as automatically believing it’s useless. That’s what this guy was doing with his Catholic apologia.
You should consider history to develop predictive theories(like what you’re describing). But those are always subordinate to observable reality and bothering with trying to justify them too much is generally worthless. Sometimes you just need to act.
In essence, it’s a bad argument because it both presupposes you don’t interrogate why things exist(you do, that’s the entire point of the argument in the first place) and argues that an unknown reason might exist you might have to defer to. No shit. There might also be an unknown reason that it’s incredibly destructive. Neither of those themselves are an argument, but one is certainly an appeal to tradition masked by an analogy.
There’s also a reason for imperial measurements, but it’s still a worse system than metric.
What’s your suggestion for a change to the Danish counting system? Do you think it is as obvious as going from imperial to metric?
Yes.
Stop being weird, Danes, literally everyone else figured it out.
It’S tHeiR gErmaN hEriTaGe
If the Frisians can figure out how not to be a bunch of weird number freaks while running around on clogs on their dikes and being half fucked up French the Danes have no excuse.
Even worse. 90 in old Danish is “halvfemsindstyve” but it is rarely used today. The “sinds” part is derived from “sinde” means multiplied with but it is not in use in Danish anymore. That leaves halvfems, meaning half to the five (which is not used alone anymore) and tyve meaning twenty (as it still does).
We are in current Danish shortening it to halvfems which actually just means “half to the five” in old Danish (4.5) to say 90. 92 is then “tooghalvfems” (two and half to the five, or 2+4.5). The “sindstyve” part (multiplied with 20) fell out of favour.
So we at least have some rules to the madness. Were just not following them at all anymore.
Edit: Minor old Danish math correction.
How did you guys even get to this thought process for saying this sort of thing? Why would you work in fractions for whole numbers in language to start? Is this a monarch thing like they fancied themselves a math wizard so they said it like it was a solution on countdown and others mimicked to keep them happy/sound smart themselves?
How
Why
Dane here. My guess is utter madness resulting from a history of overdosing on fly agaric filtered through the urine of slaves, followed by a distressingly long period of Catholicism.
Frankly, it’s a wonder that our ancestors didn’t come up with an even MORE bizarre way of saying numbers and other things!
The reason is that the Danish numbering system is based on a vigesimal (base-20) system instead of the decimal system. Why is a good question but it might have been influenced by French during a time where numbers from 50-100 is less frequently used, making them prone to complexity. The fractions simply occur since you need at least one half of twenty (10) to make the change from e.g 50 to 60 in a 20-based system.
ancient danes counted with their toes too lmao
That’s the technical reason, another reason is that the Danes tried to out-French the French, as they were very hip at the time.
But how did Danish end up like that even though it’s quite similar to Germanic languages and obviously neighbouring Germany?
English also has words like dozen (12) and score (20).
I guess it came from the physical counting in trading. Imagine counting 96 small items. It makes sense to group them into scores and then count the scores. 1 score 2 score 3 score 4 score and a half score. Then there are few remaining that didn’t fit it neatly in scores and then counted last. That’s a total of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 plus the 4 and a half scores.
No idea. We probably had a period where we traded a lot with the French and got influenced by the vigesimal system that way, creating the abomination of a Frankenstein monster we have today.
Little fun-fact: We still have a trace of this left in Norwegian, where the most common way to say “1.5” is not “en og en halv” (“one and a half”) but “halvannen” which roughly translates to “half second”.
We abandoned the “half third”, “half fourth” etc. very long ago (if we ever used them), but “halvannen” just rolls nicely off the tongue.
Halvannan is used in Sweden too. In retirement homes…
We actually still say “halvanden” in Danish too. Everything else is not used (except for halvfems which means 90…)
You also use halv tres (50) and halv firs (70) don’t you?
When I’m in Denmark and have to say 92 I just say “kamelåså”
Syglekole?
You just ordered a thousand litres of milk
Norway used to count like the Germans, but switched after the introduction of the telephone. There were simply too many mistakes when telling the numbers to the operators, that a change was mandated.
Old people might still use the 2+90 variant though, but it is not very common.
So now you’re calling me old? THE NERVE!
Ugh okay here’s another “Danes shouldn’t be allowed to make number stuff”:
The time 15:25 is “five minutes before half 4”
“Fem minutter i halv fire”
So you round up to 16 before even halfway, what!?
I’m very Danish and refuse to adhere to this nonsense. It’s pronounced “three twenty-five”.
Jeg elsker dig for det
