this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Even worse. 90 in old Danish is "halvfemsindstyve" but it is rarely used today. The "sinds" part is derived from "sinde" means multiplied with but it is not in use in Danish anymore. That leaves halvfems, meaning half to the five (which is not used alone anymore) and tyve meaning twenty (as it still does).
We are in current Danish shortening it to halvfems which actually just means "half to the five" in old Danish (2.5) to say 90. 92 is then "tooghalvfems" (two and half to the five, or 2+2.5). The "sindstyve" part (multiplied with 20) fell out of favour.
So we at least have some rules to the madness. Were just not following them at all anymore.
How did you guys even get to this thought process for saying this sort of thing? Why would you work in fractions for whole numbers in language to start? Is this a monarch thing like they fancied themselves a math wizard so they said it like it was a solution on countdown and others mimicked to keep them happy/sound smart themselves?
The reason is that the Danish numbering system is based on a vigesimal (base-20) system instead of the decimal system. Why is a good question but it might have been influenced by French during a time where numbers from 50-100 is less frequently used, making them prone to complexity. The fractions simply occur since you need at least one half of twenty (10) to make the change from e.g 50 to 60 in a 20-based system.
ancient danes counted with their toes too lmao
That's the technical reason, another reason is that the Danes tried to out-French the French, as they were very hip at the time.
why would you avoid the fraction and use it up to 100 then minus 8. I dont have a lot of an issue with it being base 20 but the idea that talking in numbers you have to know fractions for a child is WILD to me. You have to do like a month of understanding math fractions to get how to speak whole numbers.
We don't really learn the reason, we just memorise the word for the number. Kinda like you know the word "dog" means a four legged cute creature, but not why the name is "dog". The old rules are not something we are teached, I just got curious after a confused foreigner made me think about the system for a second :p
But how did Danish end up like that even though it's quite similar to Germanic languages and obviously neighbouring Germany?
English also has words like dozen (12) and score (20).
I guess it came from the physical counting in trading. Imagine counting 96 small items. It makes sense to group them into scores and then count the scores. 1 score 2 score 3 score 4 score and a half score. Then there are few remaining that didn't fit it neatly in scores and then counted last. That's a total of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 plus the 4 and a half scores.
No idea. We probably had a period where we traded a lot with the French and got influenced by the vigesimal system that way, creating the abomination of a Frankenstein monster we have today.
Little fun-fact: We still have a trace of this left in Norwegian, where the most common way to say "1.5" is not "en og en halv" ("one and a half") but "halvannen" which roughly translates to "half second".
We abandoned the "half third", "half fourth" etc. very long ago (if we ever used them), but "halvannen" just rolls nicely off the tongue.
We actually still say "halvanden" in Danish too. Everything else is not used (except for halvfems which means 90...)
You also use halv tres (50) and halv firs (70) don't you?
Halvfjerds for 70 but yes. Firs is 80 though, so that doesn't make in much easier.
Fjerde = fourth, fire = four. That makes "half to the fourth" become "halv til fjerde" or "halvfjerds" while "four times twenty" becomes "firsindstyve" and shortened to new Danish "firs"
Halvannan is used in Sweden too. In retirement homes...
In polish, "półtora" means one and a half, it comes from a proto-Slavic word meaning "half-second" for some reason
Dane here. My guess is utter madness resulting from a history of overdosing on fly agaric filtered through the urine of slaves, followed by a distressingly long period of Catholicism.
Frankly, it's a wonder that our ancestors didn't come up with an even MORE bizarre way of saying numbers and other things!
Also I'm pretty sure losing folks to stupid wars in England didn't help, the Great Heathen army and the conquest of England by Sweyn Forkbeard come to mind. No the relative prosperity and peace of Cnut the Great doesn't make up for the theoretical brain drain.
When I'm in Denmark and have to say 92 I just say "kamelåså"
Syglekole?
You just ordered a thousand litres of milk
That's actually happened a couple of times in Denmark (accidentally and after the sketch was released) https://www.tv2.no/nyheter/utenriks/span-data-lab-colortxt-blue-classtxt-blue-idext-gen1386kamelasa/span-dansk-kjopmann-skulle-ha-270-liter-melk-fikk-2575-liter/7268663/
Oh man, that takes me back.
If you haven't seen it, enjoy
Why do they sound vaguely Irish?
This is making my brain hurt. I need to try reading a few more times but, if I am understanding it correctly, the old Danish way of saying it is mathematically incorrect?
Half-to-five == 2.5
2.5*20 == 50
...
Did I read that correctly?
I think it means half less than 5, or 4.5
Maybe you'd say "half until 5" in english
for no particular reason, in English, 5:30 can be said as "half past 5" but never "half until 6". (but "five thirty" is still more common)
Quarter-past the hour, and quarter-till, are still common. Though perhaps less common as we move towards digital clocks.
I'm not Danish, but I think he meant 4.5 instead of 2.5. It's like halfway from 4 to 5, not from 0 to 5.
A similar word exists in Finnish too, when going from 1 to 2: "puolitoista" translates to "half second", like halfway to the second number, and is commonly used to refer to 1.5, BUT without any multiplication shenanigans.
Correct.
And so on. You might notice that I sometimes write it like "halvfemte" and other times "halvfems". The latter is just the way it was spelled when used in a combined word (another fun quirk in Danish that we inherited from Germanic this time!). 90 is today spelled just "halvfems".
I love how halvfems exists but fems doesn't (and I guess it never did)
(5-0,5)x20 = 4,5x20 = 90? 2+((5-0,5)x20) = 2+(4,5x20) = 2 + 90 = 92?
Oh! That makes my brain hurt a bit less. It's "subtract half from five".
Yeah, it's kinda the difference between saying "the clock is currently half past twelve" (the English way) and "the clock is currently half to one" (which we say in Danish and probably in a wealth of non-English languages too).
It absolutely reminded me of the fight we have here in Germany about how to say what time it is.
Some rare people (like my beloved girlfriend) only really understand when you say something like, "four o'clock thirty"
The rest of us is fine using "half five" to refer to that.
But the real argument is in the quarters.
Some people just say "quarter past four" while others borrow the concept from above and say "quarter five"
The one group calls it "quarter to five" while the others stick to their concept and call it "three-quarters five"
It is a regional difference, but the groups are totally scattered and don't follow typical geographical or administrative borders.
We've had meme wars over this.
Sorry to ping you a bunch with replies. I'm curious now, do you have unique numeral symbols for the numbers after 9?
No, we use the same numeral symbols as everyone else. We just pronounce it in the most unintuitive manner possible.
I can imagine that we once had symbols representing the base 20 system but standardised at some point to decimal symbols. I though haven't encountered any piece of history to back that up.