• einkorn@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 months ago

    Well, I DO know how the French count and compared to English it IS highly confusing. You can hardly convince me that saying “Four times twenty and ten” is as straight forward as saying “Nine tens”.

    And just to be clear: I’m not some Yankee or Brit with a superiority complex, no, I am German, and we have our own shitty version of this: Instead of moving along the digits from highest to lowest, as in “Four hundreds and two tens and nine”, we do “Four hundred and nine and two tens”.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Wow, it’s like US uses metric system for counting and y’all do “imperial counting”

    • Beryl@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the “score”, see for example Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address “Fourscore and seven years ago…” means 87 years ago.

    • FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      It’s less confusing if you think of 70 and 90 as separate words without trying to analyze what their constituting words mean.

      But etymologically, sure, it makes no sense.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Instead of moving along the digits from highest to lowest, as in “Four hundreds and two tens and nine”, we do “Four hundred and nine and two tens”.

      English is less consistent, going from nine-teen to twenty-one. German stays consistent with its lower two digits.

      • Rinox@feddit.it
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        6 months ago

        From 11 to 19 is always kind of weird in many languages. In Italian you go from essentially saying “one-ten” “two-ten”…“six-ten” to “ten-seven” “ten-eight” “ten-nine”. Then it goes in like in English. Why? No reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • Smc87@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 months ago

      The dude was saying people are angry at you because they don’t understand, not that you dont understand.