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?

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

I think it means half less than 5, or 4.5

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

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.

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.

Oh man, that takes me back.

If you haven't seen it, enjoy

Syglekole?

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.

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)

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

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