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Re:Counting in the wrong language by BurningFrog on Friday November 22, 2019 @10:09AM (#21606190)
Danish has a similar madness going on.

66 is "six and three twenties" 77 is "seven and half four twenties"

I've been told that Danish accountants use Swedish or Norwegian numbers to avoid mistakes.

https://blogs.transparent.com/danish/2011/09/14/counting-in-...

Re:Counting in the wrong language by Quekid5 on Friday November 22, 2019 @04:23PM (#21610230)
66 is seks-og-tres, i.e. seks (6) og (and/+) tres (60). The latter is technically "tresindstyve" (which is similar to the French, 3x20), but I can guarantee you that the number of people who actually know and care about that is infinitesimal. Additionally, "tres" is not really a word that can be mistaken for another number word. What usually screws people over is pronunciation and thus "tredive" vs "tretten" which sound shockingly similar in Danish.

(This happens a lot in Danish. It's incredibly sloppy on pronunciation and people somehow mostly still understand each other.)

EDIT: I had to think about it for a bit, but the situation for 77 is actually equivalent. No speaker of Danish actually thinks about "halvfjerds" as a compound number -- it just "70". I suspect it's actually very similar for French speakers, but their hyphens do make it harder to just lump the thing into a single concept/number :).