French should translate to "hundred sixty fifteen" which is another level of aberration altogether (I'm French)

Does the cognitive energy expended by French to do basic counting conditions their brain from early childhood for mathematical proficiency resulting in so many great mathematicians whose native language was French? </end_of_joke>

What I always wonder, do French programmers generalize this numbering scheme to pronounce 0x4B as quatre seize onze?

Ah right I remember hearing somewhere that you guys don't have words for 70, 80, and 90 and do this odd sum of two thing. I suppose there are worse ways than the reverse German :D

The French language has such words, but Frenchmen don't use them. For example they prefer to say the old fashioned "quatre-vingt-dix" (4 - 20 - 10) instead of the perfectly fine "nonante" that French speakers in Belgium use.

It's the same in Switzerland, which makes an order of magnitude more sense IMO:

Soixante

Septante

Huitante

Nonante

Cent

the Danish is actually a little more complicated

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.

The system is actually based on scores, 20, which is called a snes in older Danish, so halvtreds is short for halv tredje snes, the half third score, and 60 is tres, short for tre snese, i.e. three scores and so on. So for the tens between 50 and 90, we count scores, and if it's not a whole number of scores, we name it the half of the score that we are into. It's also preserved in a very infrequently used variant word for 80, firsindstyve, which is just 4 score, more explicitly (tyve is the modern word for twenty). In conclusion: Yes, the Danish number system is relatively silly.

> the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?

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.

>> the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?

>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

More precisely, French (cent soixante quinze) is actually: hundred sixty fifteen. Seventies, eighties (quatre-vingt = four twenties), and nineties (quatre-vingt-dix = four twenties and ten) are a mess in most French dialects.

Norwegian changed via a language reform a few decades ago. "Fem og sytti" used to be the norm (we inherited some of the Danish rules with the reverse numbers, but not the "halvfjerds" bit (which is effectively "half and four times 20")), and was still common well into the 80's-90's. I learned the new form at school, but picked up the old form from my parents.

Danish is in fact slightly more complicated. They have a vigesimal system with a base of 20, with halvfjerds, or halffourth, meaning 3½ times 20. So rather hundred five and three-and-a-half score.

Norway has an alternative that is the same as the Germans. (175 - hundred and five and seventy)

It was more popular in the past, but is still used in many dialects.

I grew up with both the old one and the new one so I sometimes say it the old way and I am almost happy that my kids don't understand it immediately so I have to correct myself.

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.

Norway have had at least half a dozen language reforms in parliament that dictate the written language, and so indirectly pronunciation.

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...