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).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.
Kamelåså
I’m not sure what’s more asinine, the colors chosen for this map, or the
DutchDanish.Edit: worth it for the joke
🇬🇧 ninety
🇫🇷 quatre-vingts-dix
🇩🇰 HALVFEMSSomething rotten...
Seriously, have trouble enough with numbers anyhow. The French system is far more than my little brain can compute, so I pretend to have learned the language from Belgians.
But who knows, maybe the Danish system would have tipped my infant brain into having a better grasp of some concepts?
I'll see you at twenty past nine
NL: oh you mean 10 before the half of 10
Four score and twelve. Let's bring it back.
Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian use fuck knows what word for 90. Almost every Slavic language uses „nine tens”. Eastern ones just went stupid and mushed „nine” and „hundred” into a paste.
There are two versions of its etymology:
- it’s „nine tens”, except there’s no „tens” part and someone had a stroke… repeatedly
- it’s „nine on the way to hundred” with no „on the way” part and with „in steps of ten” implied; oh and someone had a stroke… repeatedly
So we just roll with it.
PS: Do not ask about 40. There’s supposedly a reason for it, but we don’t really know either.
