Quatre-vingt douze isn’t incredibly onerous when you use it in practice.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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
the thing nobody mentions is that the 4x20 part became a word that just means 80 in people's mind, it kinda not literal anymore, but the Swiss and Belgian ways are still better (edit the 4x20+10 is similarly just 90)
Most Danes does not know how 92 is constructed - it is just as picture one, second calculation: 2 and halvfems = 92.
However, I do feel like we're using Imperial unites.
I think the first picture jumps over a little bit of calculation:
9 x 10 + 2
2 + 9 x 10
p.s. The third one makes total sense!
97
4x20 + 10 + 7
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
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!?
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.
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
Agree - even "3 25" would be perfectly normal.
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.
You can say the same in Poland. "Za pięć w pół do czwartej."
Same in Dutch,
"Vijf voor half vier"
shakes fist THE DANES!
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.
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.
This comment makes me so sleepy...
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.
Change it to what? Twenty-one? One Twenty? Four times twenty and one? Four time twenty plus ten and five? You could go the Germanic way, the Anglo-Saxon way, or the French way. Probably there are more ways to express numbers.
It's not as straight forward as imperial to metric, where metric is logical and imperial isn't. A vigesimal system is logical, just like binary or hexadecimal.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
There's also a reason for imperial measurements, but it's still a worse system than metric.
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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.
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