Norway used that as the standard order until 1951, when an official reform changed the language to LTR. This was due the older way of stating numbers causing confusion when reading phone numbers and similar. It's still not universal, but younger generations generally now state numbers universally left to right.

There’s examples of it in English too, although it’s very old-fashioned. An example would be the rhyme with “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”.

Correct. The grouping matters, and double-digits in groupings are also reversed - "fünf und sechzig tausend fünf hundert sechs und dreißig".

Another thing, years in German aren't spoken as "twenty twenty-one" as we commonly do in English, but instead the number is spoken out fully - "two-thousand one and twenty" ("zwei tausend eins und zwanzig").

In England, the little voice in Google Maps told me to take the "B one thousand, one hundred and thirteen", when every human i know would call that road the "B one one one three".

I would honestly most likely say "triple-one three"!

IME road number† pronunciation in England goes out of its way to avoid "thousand" and "hundred" – with exceptions, of course. Off the top of my head, I reckon I say them like this:

* one or two digits = spoken as the number rather than the digits: A three, M twenty five, etc.

* three digits = sometimes spoken as digits: A two-one-seven - but sometimes broken into two numbers: B one-eleven

* four digits = sometimes the number A thirty-one-hundred (never three-thousand-one-hundred!), sometimes digits B triple-one three, sometimes year-style B thirteen eighteen

There are probably more variations that I can't think of right now too. It's a mess :D

† and bus route numbers, for that matter

In French, it’s faster to say « Cent treize » than « Un, Un, Trois ». Phone numbers in my country are grouped by two.

This is now totally off-topic, but I'd like to know if there is any Googler at all working on adding location tags to their text-to-speech model.

Hearing Google Assistant/Maps mispronounce German street or city names in an American accent is very grating to the ears. The pronunciation of a location name should ignore the language spoken, right? (Ignore for a moment the edge cases, like München vs Munich... although the voice says, "Munchin'," which is wrong in both languages!) And it can't be too complicated to borrow phonemes from another language where they don't exist... Right? Your American text-to-speech algorithm encounters an umlaut, then generate the correct waveforms from a language with umlauts.

(I'm sure someone reading this is jumping up and down, yelling about the "photo of a bird" xkcd.)

Not really comparable to photo of a bird, because using the geographic bounds for what language spoken there should work in 99.99% of the cases.

(I have my phone set to english, because I prefer it like that, despite living in austria, europe. Street names are one of the reasons I rarely ever use google maps for navigation)

It's a hard problem in a way. If my language is localized to English, am I more likely to understand the native pronunciation of a street, or the English mispronunciation?

That's true. To extend this idea, should you pronounce someone's name as they pronounce it? Even if you've only known it one way?

(The German Michael is kinda... Michh-aye-ehl'.)

I don't understand if you're presenting this question broadly, in a vacuum? Or if you're still in the context of your question about (mis-)pronunciation of streets etc. while providing navigation for a driver whose chosen language is not the same language as the current location, and who it may be safe to assume cannot understand the local languages' pronunciation even when the alphabet is similar (e.g. an English speaker in a Portuguese speaking country is very unlikely to understand if the navigayor natively pronounces "rua da Heitor do Rio do Engenho", a name I just made up that may exist somewhere, which I think demonstrates the difficulty I'm talking about.)

For map information, the map app might better tag the language of the word being sent to the TTS engine.

Ah right. My mistake. It would be five and sixty thousand ... Yuck!

I guess this is exactly what we're talking about---mistakes because you are not natively familiar with a particular system, and then you miss the non-base case. For me, I got the tens digit right but not the ten thousands digit.

In the memory case, it's knowing to change a pointer location because an address to a 32-bit value will start or end at a different address than a 64-bit value.

I totally hate people who repeat a phone number back to you, but with different digit grouping. How the hell am I supposed to know if that's the same number!? Just repeat it as I said it already...

numbers grouped in twos are great for mnemonic memorization. you'll easily come up with an association for many two digit numbers.

ex. 415-222-9670 becomes: sub universal (one less than the answer to life, the universe and everything) deck (52 cards) swift (she's feeling 22) resolution (old dpi on wandows) top speed (California speed limit)

now isn't "sub universal deck swift resolution top speed" easier than googling twitter hq? ;] granted, the associations have to make sense to you. for me, 96 was a toss up between nashville (code name of windows 96) and the resolution i had to train myself to remember after moving from the mac's 72.

I just can't write down phone numbers when people pronounce them that way. "Nul vier­honderd­vijf­en­zeventig twee­ën­tachtig zes­en­dertig een­en­negentig"? You lost me at nul.