Why do you say the letter "O" when you mean the digit "0"?
Why do you say the letter "O" when you mean the digit "0"?
Examples:
- One oh two Main Street
- Four oh seven PM
- Biology one oh one
- Eight six seven, five three oh nine
- Four oh four: Not found
Not just a US thing, so I hope this is okay to ask here. I have just never encountered this is any language other than English. Is it simply that O and 0 look similar, and that "oh" has fewer syllables than "zero"? I have not heard a good explanation from coworkers who I've asked.
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In Japanese, they sometimes call 0 'circle' (maru).
Very much not an American thing or even an English language thing.
Yeah, but it just gets shortened to 零, れい, one syllable.
Edit: I would much rather say れい than ゼロ, just slides off the tongue faster.
It depends; a lot of commercials I hear still say maru or zero compared to rei, but I think that's for rhythmic and mnemonic purposes. I'm not immediately sure of other contexts.
Rei and maru are not related to one another. Rei is used a lot less frequently than you would think.
Has my Japanese gotten that bad that I’m being corrected on that too? That was my first language.
sigh
Oh! A native speaker! I'll take this opportunity to ask: Is there a distinction between 零 and ゼロ or is it more or less interchangeable?
Background context: white woman, Air Force baby, moved to to America with my dad when he got redeployed when I was 11, scrambled to learn English, polished up my English with shit like Magic the Gathering, Futurama, and later, Disco Elysium, and am lately struggling to maintain my Japanese so I don’t feel linguistically homeless.
That said: it mostly just depends on whether you want stylistic choices of picking more English loan words (very modern, funky-style) or if you’re more of a traditionalist. Sometimes I’d use ゼロ when giving driving directions, but I’d also use 零 when telling time.
So yeah, I don’t know.
Edit: using 丸 in both of these contexts is weird but sometimes I’d use 丸 in phone numbers. Fuck, who opened this can of worms?
Thanks for answering. I am not Japanese, nor a Japanese speaker of any level, but I dabbled into the language a bit.
I've had this notion that 「零」 is akin to ‘null’ or ‘naught’ in English while 「ゼロ」 is more about the digit ‘0’. It seems logical to me, but if there's anything I've learned learning languages it is that languages are not always logical, sometimes not even making sense.
RE: 丸 IDK where I've heard 丸 being used for phone numbers but I also remember it being used that way.
But 零時半 gets used quite a bit, especially for people like me, who have no fucking restraint and don't go to bed on-time.
Like any language, inconsistencies abound everywhere.
Language evolves pretty quickly. Do you still live in Japan? You hear 'maru' a lot in recent years. I agree in regards to saying 'rei' versus 'zero'.
Nah, I've been in Oregon since I moved here. My English is pretty good now though; I pass as a native English speaker now, and generally don't let people think otherwise. Once in a long while I'll hear people shit talking me for being trans in Japanese, but not often (it usually happens in English, sadly).
I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully your neighbors will become more tolerant with time.