this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 155 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What's going on in Denmark?

[–] [email protected] 233 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (18 children)

It's base 20 like in France, plus the quirk that we have an ordinal numeral way of saying half integers, i.e. 1.5 is "half second", 2.5 is "half third", 4.5 is "half fifth". So 92 is said as "two and half fifth times twenty". We've since made the "times twenty" implicit for maximum confusion, so it's just said as "two and half fifths".

Also, the ordinal numeral system for halves is only really used for 1.5 these days, so the numbers don't really make sense to anyone. When speaking to other Scandinavians, we often just say "nine ten two".

Why don't we just change it to the more sensible system then? Because language is stubborn.

[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Now imagine moving there as a foreigner from a normal country and someone telling you their phone number! It's like having a micro stroke.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

1.5 is "half second", 2.5 is "half third", 4.5 is "half fifth"

Interesting. ~~Regionally, some~~ Germans measure time like this, i.e. "half two" is 01:30 resp. 13:30. (Which is different from English, where people who say "half two" mean "half past two".)

We've since made the "times twenty" implicit for maximum confusion, so it's just said as "two and half fifths".

I know very little about Danish, but I learned that Danes slur the middle of most words. So I suspect you actually pronounce even less of the word than you'd write..?

Because language is stubborn.

Belgian French gives me hope.

--

[Edited: Usage is not regional]

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regionally, some Germans measure time like this, i.e. "half two" is 01:30 resp. 13:30.

This isn't regional nor "some", I never met a German wo doesn't. Sure, there is "13 o'clock 30" and both are valid but I'd say the default is still the half system.

When it comes to quarters, there are regional differences and it's a common "ice breaker" or small talk topic when people from all over Germany come together.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am dumb. I confused this with dreiviertel vs. Viertel vor.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It's pronounced "toh-år-hal-fems".

That's 3 syllables, because the first two are glissando, but even the most rural person needs some consonants between the rest to make any sense.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

When we say "half two" we also mean 13:30. It's a pain when in Britain.

And yeah, I guess in pronouncing you'd say 92 as "to'å'l'fems" rather than "to-og-halv-fems".

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So the Danish can do this bullshit with everyday numbers and it’s cool because language , but I mention that it’s 70 degrees outside and everyone starts arguing about metric?

Everything is arbitrary, I’m gonna go build a dresser in multiples of rabbit foot while you all figure something out.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

Danish people are environmentally damaged by the flatness of their country and the rest of Scandinavia pitty them. We will take care of this. We will teach them how to speak. Soonish.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

And to confuse even further, the cardinal number (ninety-two) is "to-og-halv-fems" in Danish without the *20. But if you need the ordinal number (92nd), then we add in the x20 as in "to-og-halv-fem-sinds-tyvende". Danish is very easy and transparent 😊

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)
# 🇩🇰
1 en
2 to
3 tre
4 fire
5 fem
6 seks
7 syv
8 otte
9 ni
10 ti
11 elleve
12 tolv
13 tretten
14 fjorten
15 femten
16 seksten
17 sytten
18 atten
19 nitten
20 tyve
21 enogtyve
22 toogtyve
30 tredive
40 fyrre
50 halvtreds
60 tres (threes)
70 halvfjerds (½fourths)
80 firs (fours)
90 halvfems (½fifths)
92 tooghalvfems (twoand½fifths)
100 hundred

In Czech, we say „čtvrt na osm“ (quarter to eight), „půl osmé“ (half of eighth) and „tři čtvrtě na osm“ (¾ to eight) to mean 19:15, 19:30 and 19:45, respectively, so I kinda get it.
Similarly, in German, 🕢=„halb acht“.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

We play on Hardcore mode.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Also: the green (at least with English) should be (9 × 10) + 2

[–] PM_ME_FEET_PICS 46 points 1 year ago (15 children)

English is 90 + 2. Ninety is its own distinct word.

French is similar to English (base ten) but after 60 it gets weird and then at 80 switches to base 20 until 99.

70 in French is 60 + 10 80 and above in French is 4 × 20 + what ever number is needed to get there.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

So to say 102 in French, you'd say four-times-twenty-plus-twenty-two.

I don't believe you.

EDIT: What in the actual fuck. You were right. 😳

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

No. 102 in French is "cent deux".

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I love this topic, keep the comments going! It gets even wilder/weirder when reading historical German monastary documents from the early modern period that sometimes mixed German numerical grammar with latin letters and abbreviations. For example this was a common way to write prices in the early 17th century in my region of study:

xiv C Lviұ f xxv bb iy d

All of this was in early modern German Kurrent (old cursive), of course, and with not always obvious whitespaces inbetween. The letters v and x looked somewhat similar, too, and you better don't miss the small strikethroughs anywhere in the lower or upper end of a letter which indicated "minus half" (except for the letter capital C which always has it). This is the kind of fun that brings me joy during my day while simultaneously providing the content for nightmares at night.

For some closure:
The short example would read as: (10+(5-1))*100 + 50+((5+3)-0.5) florin, 10+10+5 batzen, and 1+1+1 denari.
And that would translate to a price of 1457 ½ florin (guilders), 25 batzen (silver coin) and 3 denari (pennies).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Am I correct in thinking that this would be a relatively enormous amount of money for a normal person in that time?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Yes, absolutely! My work is related to monasteries. Some of these institutions were large economical organisations with hundreds or thousands of affiliated workers (in addition to the few dozens of actual clergy) stretching hundreds of villages/cities. Monastaries basically were the major corporations of the time. They did handle these amounts of money regularly.

Historical purchasing power for anything before the industrial revolution is hard to approximate. On the one hand because wages were not only payed in money, on the other hand because labor was very cheap and material cost was high - the inverse of today. To illustrate: They did lots of recycling work that would seem fanatical to us today, e.g. straightening old nails, reusing stones and wood from deconstructions, or even excavating and resharpening rotten fenceposts. To add some general and very rough perspective: An unskilled worker/day-worker could expect a yearly wage in the order of magnitude of about 5 fl (guilders) per year for very hard work and long working hours for 6 or 7 days a week (payed daily in non-face-value coins like pennies). However, it was common for wages to include living accomodation and/or food staples (that included wine or beer) - or pay out the worth of these things, separately. A pair of shoes was a valued gift one could give to an unskilled worker on special occasions.

It was a different time with different societal and economical systems in place. Estimated simplifications you might read online (e.g. 1 fl = 50€) are therefor to be taken with a buttload of salt - to the point one might call it a misrepresentation. Then there were the multiple events with increased silver and gold imports from the new world (combined with some greedy/desperate lords reducing the silver share of their coins). This led to multiple changes in the exchange rates between various regional gold, silver and non-face-value coins of the same names, complicating thing even more.

To solve these issues, the prices I named above would be in fictional coins of account, not actual physical coins that were payed. People had to do quite some math when doing accounting - and yes, minor errors happened all the time.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It's a pretty enormous amount of money now. I was thinking that a gold coin was 1oz which would have been an insane amount of money but some research has told me that guilder can refer to several different coins that are between .08oz and .11oz of gold mixed with other precious metals. Ignoring the other precious metals and assuming the lowest gold content 1457.5 guilders is a bit over 116 oz of gold. Gold is approx. $1900/oz so in gold alone that is over $220,000.

[–] captain_aggravated 31 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Man and here I thought the English system was kinda screwy, where at first it's in base 12 and base 20 at the same time what with having special unique names for all digits up to twelve, and then thirteen through nineteen are also uniquely weird, then at twenty we decide "man fuck that" and then it's in base 10 until we repeat that pattern every 100, ie "one hundred seventeen." Or then we occasionally do stupid things like "seventeen hundred" instead of "one thousand seven hundred."

It just now hit me that "teenager" is an inherently English construct because that weird partial second decade we have. I'm curious, how does that work in languages? Like, in French they have special words up to 16 and only do "ten-seven, ten-eight, ten-nine." You spend seven years as a teenager in England but only three in France.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Germanic languages share this. German has neun, zehn, elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn...

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (6 children)

In Hungary we don't even have a separate name for 11 and 12, just 10 + 1 and 10 + 2. But at least we messed up the billions, it's called 'milliárd' and the trillion is 'billió'. We were so close to making it perfect.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

*sigh* That's normal across Europe, including the UK until recently.


Legend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Anyway, don’t tell me Hungarian is sensible when second (unit of time) is “másodperc”.

[–] threelonmusketeers 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

But at least we messed up the billions

No, you folks did it correctly. It's everyone else who messed up: How big is a billion?

1 million squared is a billion. 1 million cubed is a trillion. (1 million)^4 is a quadrillion. And so forth with pent-, sex-, sept-, oct-, etc. Milliard, billiard, trilliard, etc. slot in between the powers of one million.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think Denmark should stop doing crack.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I’m not sure what’s more asinine, the colors chosen for this map, or the ~~Dutch~~ Danish.

Edit: worth it for the joke

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

🇬🇧 ninety
🇫🇷 quatre-vingts-dix
🇩🇰 HALVFEMS

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's also they way it's said in Basque which is 4 x 20 + 12.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So exactly like French on the map ?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Yes, but in Basque.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

4*20+12

Four score and twelve

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So what is going on in Walloon and Swiss French? Is it just the Parisian dialect that is messed up?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Swiss French are reasonable people, they're using 90+2.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You missed the traditional Celtic systems.

Welsh should be both 9 x 10 + 2 and 2 + 10 + 4 * 20.

And Irish – I didn't get it, they seem to have a modern 9 x 10 + 2 system, an old vigesimal and one for age?

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