this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 minutes ago

Ehh, i'm not giving France a pass either.

The answer to 100 - 8 should not be four twenties and a twelve. We're counting, not making change.

French counting is bunk. Way, Way, better then Denmark though apparently

[–] [email protected] 3 points 26 minutes ago

@ObviouslyNotBanana Ninety-two → Nine-ty-two → 9x10+2 :troll:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 35 minutes ago

The map is wrong, Czechs can do both 2+90 and 90+2, I am not sure if it's regional within the country, or depends on the context, but they definitely use both versions

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Ugh okay here's another "Danes shouldn't be allowed to make number stuff":

The time 15:25 is "five minutes before half 4"

"Fem minutter i halv fire"

So you round up to 16 before even halfway, what!?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

That makes perfect sense to me though. In Swedish we'd say fem i halv fyra. Five minutes to half four.

But in English half four would be short for half past four. I guess.

Counting like the Danish, however, that is an abomination.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 40 minutes ago (1 children)

What's wrong with "25 over 3?" I see the need for half 4 by itself but things being relative to that is so weird to me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 minutes ago* (last edited 2 minutes ago)

Well, it's interesting because that would be the case with 15:20. That'd be tjugo över tre (twenty past three). But specifically 15:25 would be fem i halv fyra (five to half four). 15:35 is fem över halv fyra (five past half four).

And then 15:40 is tjugo i fyra (twenty to four).

So :25 and :35 are weird edge cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 50 minutes ago

Same in Dutch,

"Vijf voor half vier"

[–] sloppychops 4 points 2 hours ago

shakes fist THE DANES!

[–] [email protected] 45 points 6 hours ago (4 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 58 seconds ago

but there’s always a reason

By and large, there's a reason for everything, but it's just not always a good reason.

If I have 100 rocks and take away 8, the answer to how many rocks I Have should not require a math problem. We're counting, not making change. If your counting system isn't decimal-based, you're no better off than the US using imperial measurements.

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

there's always a reason for why things are the way they are

Of course, no one is saying that the Danes were so drunk that they simply wanted to make their numbering so much different than everyone else. The problem is that they don't want to change it, probably because "it has always been this way" or something.

Even Norwegian, which was historically more like Danish, changed to using "normal" counting in the 1950s. So it can be done, but Danes seemingly don't want to change, despite the fact it makes their language harder to learn/use.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago

It's a shame that, when Norwegians changed their counting system, the suggestion of using "to-ti" didn't catch on for 20. It would be analogous to saying "twoty" in English.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

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] 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Chesterton's fence is a warning not to commit this logical error: I don't know what this fence is for, therefore I know there is no reason for it.

It doesn't say never to remove it. It means you should try and figure out why it's there and ask around before removing it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

It's just a logic exercise that advicates forethought when enacting change. The bigger problem is people taking parables and thought experiments as gospel, faithfully adhering to the text without considering it's intent.

More people need to read Asimov's Foundation

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

I honestly don't understand what's insightful about it. It encourages a functional viewpoint that results in you inventing proposed uses for something that is a vestige of an inefficiency. Justifying something useless isn't curiosity, it's just masturbation. You should identify how a structure interacts with it's current environment. There's a reason functionalism is considered worthless in sociology.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 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 5 hours 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] 10 points 4 hours 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] 37 points 8 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] 7 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

And the French way isn't rotten? Lmao

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 hours ago

It's bad, but not danish bad

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (3 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] 0 points 1 hour ago

Dunno, I prefer french to spanish tbh. Maybe its because basque is like French.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 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] 28 points 9 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] 18 points 7 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] 10 points 7 hours ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (25 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 4 hours 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] 5 points 4 hours 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] 2 points 5 hours 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] 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

I think it means half less than 5, or 4.5

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 31 minutes ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours 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] 3 points 4 hours 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".

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