this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

For a real explanation of this watch this illuminating video.

TL;DW According to the perons, it's based on counting sheep and from base 20. 1 score = 20 sheep. 2 score = 40 sheep.
To get to 50, you have 2.5 score, but they don't say "two and a half". They are quite Germanic and say "halfway to 3" (Germans do this too). So, 50 = half three score.

The video also points out that English has (as the hodgepodge of a language it is) yet another remnant of Germanic languages: 13-19 are not "te(e)n-three to te(e)n-nine", but "three-te(e)n to nine-te(e)n", just like in German "drei-zehn bis neun-zehn".

It's quite easy to mock other languages, but there's always a reason for why things are the way they are. Think of Chesterton's fence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 minutes ago

I agree with your broader point about linguistics, but Chesterton's fence has never sat right with me. Consider the inverse:

This annoying and unnecessary fence is an inconvenience, but since nobody can remember what it's for, we dare not remove it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

There's also a reason for imperial measurements, but it's still a worse system than metric.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

What's your suggestion for a change to the Danish counting system? Do you think it is as obvious as going from imperial to metric?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

Yes.

Stop being weird, Danes, literally everyone else figured it out.

It'S tHeiR gErmaN hEriTaGe

If the Frisians can figure out how not to be a bunch of weird number freaks while running around on clogs on their dikes and being half fucked up French the Danes have no excuse.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Norway used to count like the Germans, but switched after the introduction of the telephone. There were simply too many mistakes when telling the numbers to the operators, that a change was mandated.

Old people might still use the 2+90 variant though, but it is not very common.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago

So now you're calling me old? THE NERVE!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

French is pretty stupid too. Smart Belgium with french as national tongue only changed that number aberration: They use the made-up word "octante" for eighty and "nonante" for ninety, instead of "quatre-ving" (four-twenty) or "quatre vingt dix" (four-twenty , ten) in proper french

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

What if I told you that all words are made up?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

In Belgium we use nonante, not octante, that is, iirc only used in Switzerland. That means we at least don’t use quatre-vingt onze etc.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Fun fact, english used to count the same way as german, and it still has the numbers in "reverse" from 13 to 19.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Eleven and twelve kinda are as well. They literally mean "one left" (ain-lif) and "two left" (twa-lif) with the "over ten" being implied.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago

I’m 43 years old and this is the first time I’ve seen an explanation of these numbers. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

German's my first language and I am kinda proficient in english but I never realized that the english numbers 13 to 19 work like like ours...

[–] [email protected] 80 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I think it means half less than 5, or 4.5

Maybe you'd say "half until 5" in english

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Correct.

  • Half to the second (halvanden, still in use today) = 1.5
  • Half to the third (halvtredje) = 2.5
  • Half to the fourth (halvfjerde) = 3.5
  • Half to the fifth (halvfemte) = 4.5

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".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Sorry to ping you a bunch with replies. I'm curious now, do you have unique numeral symbols for the numbers after 9?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

When I'm in Denmark and have to say 92 I just say "kamelåså"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 hours ago

You just ordered a thousand litres of milk

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 hours ago (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 hours ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago

ancient danes counted with their toes too lmao

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 hours ago (6 children)

I'm German and our way of counting is genuinely stupid. 121 would translate to "onehundred one and twenty". You'd think it's just a matter of practice but errors related to mixing up digits are statistically more common in German speaking regions. Awesome when it comes to stuff like calculating medication dosages and such. Like it's not a huge issue but it's such an unneccessary layer of confusion.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

As a non-native working in German, the numbers are one of the trickiest parts.

My jobs generally involve a lot of math and discussions of numbers, and I often struggle with swapping numbers around in my head. Especially because when you get to bigger numbers people often switch between (or use a combination of) listing individual digits left-to-right and saying multi-digit numbers.

The though is when you occasionally notice natives mess it up!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that's because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those "nastier" blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.

Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: "two thousand, five hundred and two and ninety") actually makes the strategy of "everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression" viable (i.e. "two thousand" + "five hundred" + "two and ninenty"), whilst I'm not so sure that would be possible if instead of just memorizing 100 numerical language expressions we had to do it with 1000 or more.

(If you're not a French native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting "quatre-vingt" as "four twenty" to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Its so annoying with phone numbers as well, depending how someone pronounces is. My mom always says phone numbers in 2 digits, like 06 12 34 56 78 (06 twelve fourandthirty sixandfifty eightandseventy) and you just get confused because you want to type in the first number pronounced

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Phone numbers should always be said by individual digits, makes it simpler and faster to type as you're listening

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

In some languages, pairs work fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Surprisingly, even English does it correctly

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago

except 13-19 at least

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Yes! I'm German and I hate it. It's also very inconvenient when entering numbers into a spreadsheet or something, because you have to know the whole number before you can start typing it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

That still fits the pattern of "bigger number, then smaller number."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 38 minutes ago

True. It does match the French pattern of 4x20+x.

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