That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.
Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"
I would say more that simplification makes the boring bits easy and allows the mind to concentrate on more interesting higher-level concepts. As someone who has attended a range of educational institutions for the same courses, one thing that really stood out to me about the "top-level" ones was that there was none of this "life must be hard" attitude. For the core material, the teaching was excellent and designed to make it as easy to learn for students as possible to learn. Then while "lesser" universities were examining students on those core materials (often with questions they'd seen before), the top universities asking novel questions on material that hadn't even been explicitly covered, but which the students could reasonably be expected to answer on because they had a really solid grasp of the core stuff.
Ah yes, this is very german.
If it is not a grind, it is not really work you are doing.
And it is still kind of a honor badge to moan about how little you sleep, as this shows how hard you are working all day and the ones sleeping the most less, are the hardest.
(But I do see some healthy change in that regard)
Good god, this is beautiful. Is this a German idiom?
"Morgenstund hat gold im Mund"
morning time is gold
(to which I agree at times)
or
"Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm"
The early bird catches the worm.
(to where I say, maybe the worm should have slept in that day)
"Sleeping the most less" is a beautiful turn of phrase, even if ungrammatical. Or maybe because of it.
You associate “quatre vingt” as meaning 80. In your head it’s 80. You don’t think four times twenty. So it’s not as complicated as it looks. I don’t see kids really getting that wrong.
It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the ones that moved to the British isles and became the English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems that those interplays and intersections with the cultures are what determined how French language numbering worked based on when and where and what they had contact with.
There is an institute in France hose sole purpose is to guard language, I wonder why they didn't find the motivation to clean it up a bit. It would make it much more attractive for outsiders and make it more global.
And its not just me, literally everybody I speak to who attempted to learn french has similar experience. Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you mixed gender of a noun) or often just give up.
- 70 = septante (versus soixante-dix, which is 60-10)
- 80 = huitante (versus quatre-vingt, which is 40-20), *EDIT*: wrong, see below.
- 90 = nonante (versus quatre-vingt-dix, which is 40-20-10)
The article also mentions something interesting I didn't know:
> The use of septante for "seventy" and nonante for "ninety", in contrast to Standard French soixante-dix (literally "sixty-ten") and quatre-vingt-dix'("four-twenty-ten"). Those former words occur also in Swiss French. Unlike the Swiss, however, Belgians never use huitante for quatre-vingts ("four twenties"), with the use of octante in the local Brussels dialect as being the only exception. Although they are considered Belgian and Swiss words, septante and nonante were common in France until around the 16th century, when the newer forms began to dominate.[4]
*EDIT*: This doesn't appear to be true, Belgian French speakers also say quatre-vingt for 80.
I’m French and, at least in my circle, I’ve never seen a native French « humiliating » a non-native trying to speak French.
And to me there is two reasons : - we know our language is difficult to learn - we are really bad when it comes to speak any foreign language
As*oles are totally a thing (especially in the banking/financial sector) but most French people are admirative of anyone who speaks more than one language. Because most of us can’t.
I don’t bother now. Germany, Italy, Greece, sure, but not France.
An amusing version of this happened to me in Porto recently at a bookshop. Many moons ago I was fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, but today that's retained mostly in reading, I can't speak well nor can I easily follow European Portuguese speakers. I was browsing the Portuguese literature section when the shop keeper asked me question (which I didn't catch), and then upon ascertaining I spoke English she rather forcefully explained where the English section was, but very confusedly watched as I politely kept where I was. To make matters probably more confusing I ended up buying a linguistically avant-garde book that I soon learned really is best suited for native speakers (Guimarães Rosa, the author, is basically a Brazilian James Joyce)
It seems like a lot of people have this very strong "foreigner = English" mapping in their head. As soon as you're outed as "foreigner" for any reason, you get the English (even if you're proficient in the local language).
I definitely think it's disrespectful to switch languages on someone like that, but a lot of people just don't seem to think about it. Multi-lingual conversation manners are not commonly talked about!
Interestingly enough, if you listen to people talking in the 50s (old films, radio, etc) , they speak something which is a lot closer to written French. I'm under the impression that there's a growing gap between spoken and written French, and the French académie is not helping by essentially preventing the written language from evolving.
As to cleaning it up, well, lots of people agree with you, but always end up facing extremely strong opponents who accuse them of destroying the very nature of French culture!
> Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you mixed gender of a noun).
I'm not sure if it's a language problem or a people problem. I often encounter people that mix the gender of nouns, and I don't really care about it. It's a lot to learn and not very important. Just like some people don't have a great accent, that's how it is, it doesn't stop people from communicating. Same for the people that I know, unless we're asked we wouldn't bother correcting someone that "le table" is actually "la table" because tables are female.
On my side, I find the pronunciation of English to be very hard to learn and to master, and am scared of sounding stupid whenever I talk English, so I avoid it, and end up not being good at it, so I can understand the sentiment.
I also often hear others mispronounce words; friends, colleagues, even on TV.
I guess my point is that if you’re mispronouncing English words you’re speaking it like a native!
AFAIK the net effect is that languages with complicated number representations do worse on math tests.
>Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"
Can you say that the same about English? ie. four-ty = 4 × 10
edit: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be...
Taking some salient examples, in English 9 out of 10 of those numbers are single syllables and 7 is two. In French, all ten are single syllables.
Malcolm Gladwell did some good research ('Outliers' is a great book) in this area.
Chinese are generally better at math than other ethnicities precisely because of their language.
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
Gladwell points out that the English speakers have about 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly, but the Chinese are almost certain to get it right every time. He explains, "Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. "And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds," Gladwell adds.
https://gineersnow.com/students/best-explanation-asians-good...
You don't normally use it for numbers but you certainly can, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
Another useful mnemonic that for me works even better than melody is rhythm. I noticed that I have about 20-notes buffer for last-heard rhythmic phrase even if I wasn't paying attention at the time. So for example after I ran down a flight of stairs I can count them by remembering the rhythm of my steps and adding them. My friend who has way better short term memory than me can't do this, but he can see the image he was looking at recently. Now that's cheating :)
It might just be more obvious since the English patterns are unfamiliar.
One of the more surreal experiences I've had was watching an English-language news broadcast in China. The presenter was speaking English and had obviously put in a lot of effort trying to learn what natural English sounded like. The general pattern of intonation over her sentences was quite realistic for English.
What made it surreal was that the intonation didn't match the words. Everything she said, it was like she was using the intonation pattern of some other sentence and applying it to a completely different sentence.
But it's indeed quite different to other languages, even the other Slavic ones.
Germanic intonation and sentence melody (for example like in German or English) is completely distinct from the Polish one. And this melody seems to be something sticky as you can always recognize Polish people just by their intonation even when they speak otherwise perfect German or English. That's not the case for for example Russian, or Czech, or Slovak people.
How does he know that people remember it via "reading out loud to themselves"?
Maybe they visualize it instead.
Maybe people chunk it into a 3 digit and a 4 digit number, like a phone number.
Why should "reading out loud to yourself" be limited to the speed of actual speech anyway?
This is not something you hear often.
BTW, it's similar to German in that regard, because it's two-twenty.
Also interestingly, the way 8 sounds in Algerian Arabic would be 2 syllables. Although take it with a grain of salt because it's third-hand information. I learned this from my father, who's not native (but has lived in Algeria in his childhood)
What is the "one" night in that title? Any chance wa is related to waaHid?
No, wa (usually in basic sentences) means 'and'. Layla alone means one night. Alf is a thousand, and for certain numbers the singular is used over the plural, which is why it may seem confusing.
When you say eighteen, you think just "18" and not "8 teens". (Similarly, when you say "backwards" you think of the direction, not of "back wards")
It's similar but I don't think it qualifies as the same since we do not say "four tens". Forty is a concept in itself, just like suffix -s for plural is a separate concept from singular. Suffixes and prefixes are modifiers. We don't ordinarily say, for example, "many apple", we say "apples".
The same as when I say eight-y in English.
Citation needed?
Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. Removing complexity is difficult. Einstein, Feynman, Newton, and innumerable others are lauded for simplifying enormously complex ideas to the point of comprehension by the masses.
Oversimplifying is bad, because it implies lost information. Simplification itself is a form of sophisticated articulation.
More efficient representations of numbers are generally associated with better performance in math, historically. Roman numerals being a prime example of unnecessary complexity, compared to the maths being done by Indian people, and so on. Civilization tends to abandon conventions that are superseded in advantage.
Making things more difficult to formulate for structural reasons unrelated to the problem at hand is inefficient.
Having inefficient numbering in language is wasted energy at best.
Obfuscation is an act of counterintelligence.
"I wanted to write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time"
For the people who simplified things (Einstein, Feynman, Newton). For anyone who never had to learn or have anything to do with the more complicated system before it was simplified, it most certainly isn't an act of intelligence.
As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as ninety. Nobody thinks about this in term of 4 * 20 + 10. Although, I remember that it confused me a little bit when I learned how to count.
That being said, I'd be in favour to switch to the Swiss/Belgian/Canadian way and replace "quatre vingt dix" by "nonante".
It's a shame because soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix are confusing to write (I probably made a mistake somewhere).
Sorry for the mistake (I did check on wikipedia before adding Canada do the list but got it wrong).
> the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch.
Same in France. I believe most of us regard "septante/octante/nonante" as amusing and exotic sounding. Sadly, I've never heard anyone advocating for a switch.
EDIT: Actually now that I dug up a bit more stuff it does seem like "huitante" is the one? Maybe I am just remembering wrong, feel free to ignore my ramblings.
But only 90 and 97-99 have "quatre vignt dix". 91-96 are written as "four-twenty-eleven" through "four-twenty-sixteen".
So you can't really avoid the complexity, because only half of the numbers in the 90s have '''90''' as part of the word.
4444 = Four thousand, four hundred, four ten, four.
Though it is interesting that they group by powers of 10k instead of powers of 1k.
Not really. "One thousand five" is 1,005 in English, but it's 1500 in Mandarin. For 1005 you'd need to say "one thousand zero five".
There is another oddity in Chinese numbers which requires a bit of grammar explanation:
Chinese requires measure words when applying numbers to nouns. English has count nouns and mass nouns ("three crackers", where "cracker" is a count noun, versus "three loaves of bread", where "bread" is a mass noun); Chinese has only mass nouns. [1] Thus:
三个人 "three (三) people (人)", with 个 being a measure word appropriate for people
一只狗 "one (一) dog (狗)", with 只 being a measure word appropriate for animals
一首歌 "one song (歌)", with 首 being a measure word appropriate for poetry
Most nouns use 个.
The oddity is that 半 ("one half") occurs before the measure word when it represents the total amount, but after when it's a modification.
一个小时 "one hour (小时)"
两个小时 "two (两) hours"
半个小时 "half an hour"
一个半小时 "an hour and a half"
This also occurs with money, where it's probably the same grammatical rule:
三块 "¥3"
三块二 "¥3.20"
But for this to be fully consistent, I'd expect 零个半小时 "zero and a half hours" where in reality 半个小时 is used.
[1] Some people have argued that since e.g. "one day" 一天 has no measure word between 一 and 天, 天 must be a noun that requires no measure word. This is wrong; it is a measure word that requires no noun. An easy way to see this is that reduplication carries the same meaning that generally applies to reduplicated measure words, and not the meaning that applies to reduplication of nouns -- 天天 means "every day" in the same way that 个个 means "every [one]"; it does not mean "cute little day" in the same way that 狗狗 means "doggie".
Also thanks for saying that they're equivalent to things like "Schools of fish" or "loaves of bread". They make way more sense to me now!
That's it exactly, and it's very common. Any time the noun is clear from context, you can leave it out. (You shouldn't leave out the measure word though - where in English you might have "I'll take three", in Chinese you'd still want 三个.)
If you walk into a restaurant, someone will ask 几位 "how many?". 几 is a question word for small numbers, and 位 is a (formal, polite) measure word for people.
It's the most compact, non-ambiguous representation, and avoids symbols that print poorly or are not available everywhere.
Is this actually true? There is no "million" form in Chinese. Powers-of-1000 separators don't make any sense in the language either[1]. 150,0000 is, fully, 一百五十万 "one hundred five ten 10,000". And you obviously can't shorten that to 一百五 "one hundred five" because that's 150, not 150,0000. You could try saying 一百五万, but I don't think that makes much sense.
[1] The incompatibility between the Chinese number system and the English number system has resulted in Chinese speakers in America innovating the unit-of-salary "K". 工资几十K？ One K is, of course, USD 1000.
- Groups of 4 digits separated by the corresponding power-of-10000 kanji, e.g. 1億2345万6789. Makes sense, I would say it's actually better than just separating the digits, as it makes easier to recognize the size of the number.
- Groups of 3 digits separated by commas, e.g. 123,456,789. I asked around how they do to mentally regroup digits by four, and everybody told me that is quite difficult and don't understand why they don't group digits by four. Then again, they have the most difficult writing system in the world and a ridiculous calendar, maybe they just like challenges.
I don't know that this generalizes -- other Mandarin speakers may have a different experience. I'm really curious how Chinese-speaking people thought about these things before Arabic numerals, but not sure we can ever have a clear answer to that question.
I think it's part of how we've tended to remove dialect and en-gb terms as we've more intra-UK mixing and more non-UK born residents?
You are right, I mistakenly assumed we were talking about en-gb.
It's not common in my job to talk about scores as a metric because 20 isn't a natural unit for my work product, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear it like that, either. We still use "dozen" and "gross" for other non-decimal groupings much more commonly, e.g. "a dozen doughnuts."
Probably the only true weirdness is the 70s and 90s because they use the teen words like douze and treize, but that's honestly where the weirdness ends, and larger numbers follow very consistent rules.
> I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring
Probably not much. I doubt francophones are doing multiplication when they think of the number 80 any more than anglophones do addition when we think of the number 14. Rather, speakers presumably both memorize the names of each number and move on with life.
This is exactly what forty means, except it goes back to the Proto-Germanic fedwōr tigiwiz and so the meaning is obfuscated. Much simpler to use the same word, no?
so is "forty", optimized for quick pronunciation, a respelling of four tens.
I've never understood how Russian 40 is sorok, nor have i ever gotten an explanation, including from Russians, whereas the rest works like english, etc.
Nobody in France would do any multiplication, it is just a word.
We have a weird language ('eaux' is 'o', imagine that?) but this is not one of the crazy things.
They still use quatre vignt for 80 though.
As a German speaker with Ex-Yugoslavian roots, I'd like to point out that you have a mistake in your list.
In Serbo-Croatian (former official language of Yugoslavia) 175 (sto sedamdeset pet) is actually the order in which the number is written. Only between 10 and 20 the pronounciation is somewhat the other way around. But like the French colleague in this thread it could easily be argued that the numbers between 1 and 20 have their own words because it's not tri-deset but trinest for 13. This could be because e.g. tri-deset is actually used for 30, which sounds like three times ten. It seems Slovenian counting is more similar to German, while Serbo-Croatian is more similar to English.
Serbo-Croatian counting examples: 1 - jedan
2 - dva
3 - tri
4 - četiri
5 - pet
6 - šest
7 - sedam
8 - osam
9 - devet
10 - deset
11 - jedanest
12 - dvanest
13 - trinest
14 - četrnest
15 - petnest
16 - šesnest
17 - sedamnest
18 - osamnest
19 - devetnest
20 - dvadeset
21 - dvadeset jedan
32 - trideset dva
43 - četrdeset tri
54 - pedeset četiri
65 - šesdeset pet
76 - sedamdeset šest
87 - osamdeset sedam
98 - devedeset osam
100 - sto
101 - sto jedan
111 - sto jedanest
121 - sto dvadeset jedan
212 - dvesto dvanest
222 - dvesto dvadeset dva
...
Sincerely, a Dane :)
You’re probably thinking of Belgium and Switzerland where 97 would be - as far as I understand - “nonante-sept”
See this other StackExchange on the topic (and geographical exceptions to the octante/huitante (!)/nonante usage): https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/187/quelles-parti...
80 - vuitanta
Luckily it is only numbers 50 to 99 that work that way. 31 is simply "enogtredive", as in "one and three tens". A hundred is "hundred", not "fems", as it could be (five twenties).
70: soixante-dix (FR) "sixty-ten". Septante (BE) is literally seventy (seven decades), which is much better.
And so on and so forth for 80 (octante in BE) and 90 (nonante).
Edit: fixed seventy
Nope. That’s switzerland, belgians completely illogically have kept the 20-based naming here.
So do Belgians do it 100% like the french? Or so they mix a bit of FR and CH?
Octante as far as I know has been dead for a while and is not used anywhere, in Switzerland or elsewhere.
Let's prove that English is insane by making a literal translation of that Wikipedia definition in French:
> Littéral traduction, direct traduction ou mot-pour-mot traduction, est le traduction de un texte fait par traduire chaque mot séparément, sans regarder à comment le mots sont utilisé ensemble dans un phrase ou phrase.
A similar literal translation from english to english of 97 would be nine-tens-seven. English has some irregularities in the teens but it's decimal all the way through. French switches from decimal to vigesimal.
I'm trying to show that using a method that can only produce nonsense out of a given source is not the best way to demonstrate/prove _anything_ about the source. At best, it proves that literal translation is garbage, which is something everyone knows (except at tech giants, apparently).
There is only one way to translate "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" in English while preserving its meaning: "ninety-seven".
Pointing out the decimal <-> vigesimal switch (and the historical debates around it, for example) or the fact that the two systems cohabit would be far more useful and interesting than constructing a strawman in order to conclude that a language is "insane".
If you perform the same literal translation to 57, it doesn't look "insane". When you say the method "can only produce nonsense", I think you're just flat-out wrong.
مائة وخمسة وسبعون (One hundred and five and seventy)
You essentially listed German and several dialects of the same language. If you had listed several of the German language dialects that also slightly vary how they say the number in the same German format/order you would have had a list of equal if not greater number of support for the German format.
I think that may also provide a bit of a clue as to why the order/format is different since it must have happened some time after English formed from the German language, possibly when/because the British adopted the format/order of the Romans. But that's just speculation/hypothesis on my part. I suspect there are people who have a better insight into how that separation happened.
Danish: hundrede femoghalvfjerds (hundred five and seventy)
And the rest I've checked now:
Romanian: o sută șaptezeci și cinci (hundred seventy five)
French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen)
Swedish: hundra sjuttiofem (hundred seventy five)
Finnish: sata seitsemänkymmentäviisi (hundred seventy five)
Norweigan: hundre og syttifem (hundred seventy five)
Spanish: ciento setenta y cinco (hundred seventy five)
Soixante
Septante
Huitante
Nonante
Cent
the word for 60 in Danish is tres the word for 50 in Danish is halvtreds - so basically half 60 (I guess cause the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?), and since Danes don't pronounce the d and the halv is quick sometimes you get confused in what is being said.
But then the word for 80 is firs, fee-es with a partially swallowed r sound in there somewhere. and 70 is halvfjerds - half firs.
The word for 90 is halvfems - half fives.
a Dane speaking quickly can confuse others really quickly with these numbers as to whether it was said 50,60,70,80,90 and then you put the second number in 'backwards' as said, so
92 is to og halvfems - toe oh hellfems and so forth, but said very quickly with a tendency to not fully pronounce all of a word.
No other Nordic language is like that.
It's probably not a coindicence that the same system the French use. Apparently French was the coolest language you could speak in the 1700s and all the nobility did it.
Only the Danish swalllowed the "twenty" part of the it, so it's no longer possible to deduce any meaning from hearing the word. Add that to the fact that "half" has a universally accepted meaning too, but should be understood here as "ten-less-than".
So I think Danish wins the most bizarre counting system over the French. And the French is far more so than the German. All they're guilty of is being careless with the ordering of numerals.
>No other Nordic language is like that.
ok, I was just guessing, hence the question mark.
But I guess Boris Jensen described the reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369172
It was more popular in the past, but is still used in many dialects.
Fun fact: it was actually decided in Stortinget (the supreme legislature of Norway) in November 1950 and implemented in July 1951, as far as I know the only time a matter of how to pronounce something has been decided at that level.
E.g. the 1907 reform removed a lot of soft consonants in favour of harder ones (e.g. "løb" -> "løp", "kage" -> "kake").
Most of them, incidentally, reducing the similarity with Danish...
ZRC-SAZU might have some etymologycal answers.
On that note I notice that I usually misspell two digit numbers in Slovene. For example when writing a number, I usually write the right digit before the left when writing from dictation. Sometimes when I am thinking about a number I tend to say it the other way around, petindevetdeset instead of devetinpetdeset, even though I am a native speaker.
Traditional Welsh has constructions as:
- 16: un ar bymtheg ("one on five-ten") - 18: deunaw ("two nine") - 41: deugain ac un ("two twenty and one") - 71: un ar ddeg a thrigain ("one on ten on three twenty")
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_numerals
do so and especially blame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emper... to whom Fibonacci dedicated his liber abaci on those fancy new numbers back then.
They must have messed it up introducing that to german day-to-day use. They did it in parts arab-ordered (spoken), half reading order, where sensible would have been right-to-left one digit after the other. So you wouldn't even have to count upfront.
The only other example I can think of is the american date system
Any real data on this?
German: einhundertfünfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy)
Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy)
Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring languages:
Polish: sto siedemdziesiąt pięć (one hundred seventy five)
Czech: sto sedmdesát pět (one hundred seventy five)
Slovak: sto sedemdesiat päť (one hundred seventy five)
Hungarian: száz hetven öt (one hundred seventy five)
Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five)
Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five)
Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic
You get the idea.
Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system.
Sincerely, a Slovenian.