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[–] 122 points 9 months ago (7 children)

People make fun of French numbers, and it's not undeserved. But have you heard of Danish numbers‽

79, "nioghalvfjerds" translates to English as "nine and half fourth". "Halvfjerds" being implicitly short for "halvfjerdsindstyve", which translates as "half fourth times twenty", where "half fourth" implicitly means "three plus half the fourth" (i.e., 3.5).

That is so much more insane than 83 being "four twenties three".

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  • [–] 30 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    and i thaught we germans were stupid with our numbers because we say stuff like "zwei und dreißig"/"two and thirty" instead of "dreißig und zwei" or "dreißig-zwei".

    i wonder how stuff like this came to be, it must have been good for something to have stuck around.

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  • [–] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Oh, you guys use little endian!

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  • [–] 30 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    nope, because 132 is "einhundert zwei und dreißig" and not "zwei und dreißig und hundert" that it's inconsistent is what bothers me.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago

    It's the same in Arabic! "مئة واثنان وثلاثون" = "hundred and two and thirty" Not sure about German, but the Arabic example can theoretically come with in any order. However, you almost never see it another way

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Pretty sure it's some very old way of counting.

    English used to do it the same way after all.

    There's this nursery rhyme about "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" that I can't remember the rest of. Except that the previous or next verse ended with "rye".

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    As someone learning danish now, yup this is hell and the worst numbering system. And no, other Scandinavian countries don't do this shit.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    if it's any consolation, native danish speakers don't think about it like this, you just kinda memorize what each multiple of 10 is called. although the etymology does appear a little when using ordinals, e.g. 72nd in danish is tooghalvfjerdsindstyvende (two and half four twenties), but i think most young people would just say tooghalvfjerdsende (72 + ordinal suffix)

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Plus we have that whole thing where the only way to know if any definitive noun uses the "en" or "et" suffix (or the same as a separate word in front of the noun if it's indefinite) is to know already 🤦😄

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Sure, but in most cases, there's something loosely related to rules and logic about it.

    In Danish, the grammatical genders aren't 'male, female, nongender". There's nongender and multigender, and ABSOLUTELY no reason for anything being one or the other 🤷🏻

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    Ah yes this table is such a masculine table, such a good example of how all tables manifest masculinity, by um, having uh, legs and um.
    Describing any noun gendering in any language reads like a "we have been played for absolute fools" meme.

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