Wow, "at quarter on ten" / "at half of ten" takes even more brain cycles for me to parse. Thanks for the Slovak/Czech examples. (Incidentally, I work with a lot of Czech colleagues.)
Yeah, it makes really no sense even for native speaker when you think about it, people just accept this nonsense, in English it's either how many minutes past some time, or how many minutes to next hour, but in Czech/Slovak you talk "on hour", not sure what's origin of this nonsense, but I doubt majority of people could explain the meaning.
We also commonly use double negative:
English - I did nothing
Slovak/Czech - I didn't do nothing (reverse I did everything)
People don't think about it, just accept this nonsense and go on with it.
Czech language has even way more illogical things than Slovak, since it is older, for instance they have special letter ů which sounds exactly same as ú (as oo in Doom), but ů can't be used as first letter of word, where you must use ú and vice versa, if it's not first letter must use ů and can't use ú, despite both of them having exactly same meaning/sound.
Re:Ask HN: What does 12:00 AM mean?
by justsomehnguy on Monday March 28, 2022 @07:12AM
(#30829259)
> "at three quarters on ten"
What a mouthful. Can I ask you to write how it is written and spelled out?
https://slideplayer.cz/slide/12864735/78/images/5/Pozn%C3%A1...
Here in Czech, learning materials for 2nd grade, though my kid is learning it already in 1st grade.
Re:Ask HN: What does 12:00 AM mean?
by justsomehnguy on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @05:22PM
(#30860934)
Ah, as I though it's just rolls fine in the spoken language. "Tr/ee/chetvert" should be a good enough approximation, I suppose?
English is quite logical - half PAST nine = 9:30, but in Czech/Slovak you say literally "at quarter on ten" (9:15), "at half of ten" (9:30), "at three quarters on ten" (9:45) and that "on" ain't really obvious for someone who is not familiar with this terminology, personally I completely stopped using this terminology because I always found it archaic and extremely confusing and just use digits "nine fifteen", "nine thirty" etc.
same goes for fractions vs percentages, I don't understand media love for fractions, instead simply writing 60% they write three fifts, so I have to calculate it in my mind back to 60 to know what they are talking about instead if they used one simple digit