If you mix the English-style century-based year number constructing with the German-style swap-two-lowest-digits number constructing, year 2345 will be three-and-twenty-hundred-five-and-forty.
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If you mix the English-style century-based year number constructing with the German-style swap-two-lowest-digits number constructing, year 2345 will be three-and-twenty-hundred-five-and-forty.
dreiundzwanzighundert fünfundvierzig
So easy!
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@riley
well, English also has nine-teen instead of teen-nine
But yeah, I grew up going to a German school, and never thought the order was strange back then, but now that I speak much more Italian and English than German, it _does_ seem somewhat strange to me.
I would be in favor of a reform, but taking pronunciation into account. E.g., Zwanzidrei for 23 would be better than zwanzigdrei. Such a reform would not be easy, though
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@waltertross In a better-designed English, 19 would be onety-nine instead.
On the other hand, if the Franks had realised the power they had over the royal language use on the island, they could have convincinced the Brits to count eleven, twelve, one-and-twelve, two-and-twelve, ..., seven-and-twelve, twenty, ... twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve, twenty-one-and-twelve ..., thereby hampering English mathematics research for centuries. And just imagine the budgetary effects of combining that with the pre-decimal British currency!
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@waltertross Btw, for a cool story, look up the Kaktovik numbering system.
Only the writing system is new; the underlying base-20 counting system has been the native way in Inuit languages since time immemorial. But how cool is the idea of involving toes in counting in a weather too cool for taking the toes out and playing with them?
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@riley Ah, yeah, had seen that, and I admire who invented the Kaktovik numeral notation!
BTW, Danish also has partly 20-based numbers. E.g., 54 is fireoghalvtreds (four-and-half-three[-times-twenty]) -
@waltertross Yep. Traces of base twenty counting are sufficiently common in Central European languages that linguists have speculated that it might have been the Simple and Obvious(tm) way of counting in some of the little-known pre-writing substrate languages spoken here before the Indo-European way of speaking (and counting) largely replaced it. Unfortunately, most that we know about the Old European languages comes from ancient place names, and it has never been particularly popular to use multi-digit numbers when naming places for oneself or even for one's insufferable neighbours down the river. Ötzi may have lived before or during early phases of the PIE incursion into Europe, and thus, possibly counted in base twenty, but we'll probably never know for sure.
