German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.
Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.
You put so much effort into that and then totally missed French? four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course. Multiplication and addition required.
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"
> And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example:
> Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five)
> Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic
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.
If you want something completely insane check out standard French. 97 is "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" which translates directly to "four-twenty-ten-seven". Quebec French does this sanely though at least.
You are also forgetting that you are comparing two totally different language trees (Germanic and Slavic) … ignoring Italian for the moment.
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.
taking the opportunity to say that the most voted answer in stackexchange is wrong for Greek, in Greek for example 175 is
εκατόν εβδομήντα πέντε (one hundred seventy five)
The Dutch get numbers “backwards,” too. My poor daughter makes mistakes with writing numerals all the time. Like, writing “27” for tweeënzeventig. Sigh. She will learn eventually. I’m sure the mental challenge just makes people strong here, like the bicycling in the freezing rain.
Stupid is debatable here. Computer processors also sometimes tend to use little endian numbers instead of big endian numbers. Germans and us Slovenians just seem to prefer attention to detail and put the most significant digit of a two digit number on the second place.
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.
Even more loyal than the French to the ancient vigesimal counting system are
the Basque[0] and the Welsh[1].
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")
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.
Do they all say the "one" explicitly? In Dutch, it's "hunderdvijenzeventig", (hundred five and seventy), without the "one". That "one" is slightly more likely to be used with thousands, and a lot with millions.
My understanding is that was the way in Serbian-Croatian but it died out. I personally knew people born in early 1900s talking like that. But I can be wrong: it could be just Autro-Hungarian influence.
We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa).
Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."
Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.
As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.
English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences.
I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.
I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.
>As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.
I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers
> (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.
German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".
Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.
Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to 20, and then start saying “one”, “two”, until I get to thirty to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word for 21, 22, etc is “one-twenty”, “two-twenty”, etc, rather than “twenty-one” etc.
>Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too.
Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system, but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up.
Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness with the other party before the dictation starts.
So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs quickly.
Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to dictate it digit by digit and call it a day.
So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more problems than it solves.
But it's the same in English up until the number 20. 16 for example, six-ten. The English just count differently after 20. But I could imagine "four and seventy" for example.
Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying “it’s ten for half five” means it’s 4:20. (I think?) I’m really not sure I’ll ever have a solid understanding.
Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.
There are so many ways to say this in German and we mix it all the time, though some ways are more prevalent in certain areas. I'm leaving out the 'regular' version of just saying the numbers and such and there's also the fact that depending on situation (or how you feel that very second) you'll just say 4:20 or 16:20.
4:05: 5 past 4
4:10: ten past 4
4:15: quarter past 4
4:15: quarter 5
4:20: ten to half 5
4:20: 20 past 4
4:30: half 5
4:35: 5 past half 5
4:40: 10 past half 5
4:40: 20 to 5
4:45: quarter to 5
4:45: 3 quarters 5
4:50: ten to 5
5:00: "full"
I'm sure I missed some from parts of Germany I've never lived in/been to.
Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um". Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not important or implied by context, which you can't do if you just say the numbers.
EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".
There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote out numbers the same was German does.
The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her
purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find:
"About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation, although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current that it's totally understandable in a way.
When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn. I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these things I never got to learn this language, my brain just refused to memorise these rules :/
Opened this thread to say exactly this. It wasn't a problem for me before I started using English regularly, but in the past few years, I've been getting German numbers wrong more and more often. It's just so confusing and I have to consciously think about it every time.
There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German.
I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find:
About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.
I was at school in the north of England (Yorkshire) in the late 1970s/early 80s and there were a few schoolteachers, and some old folks, who still spoke this way.
Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still traumatized growing up with this problem.
In Dutch it is the same way. We even have another word for billion. Billion in dutch means 1000x more than the English version. Compounding is translated as combined interest.
English has million and milliard [0], but American English preferred the short scale and that has had more influence over the language. The UK only officially switched over to the "American" system in 1974.
Many European languages have the long scale, English is the odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still classify that as a European language.
Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?
We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual digits for large numbers in any language.
> Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?
Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems. And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more logical the way it is in English or other languages.
Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021) and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later with all its advantages.
I was a bit unsatisfied by the top answer which mostly seemed to be a reaction to the connotations of the word ‘backwards’ rather than a discussion of the history which was tacked on at the end.
I think the answer is that languages didn’t traditionally have base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting, and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think, 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think). So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1] question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new arithmetic system and people don’t really notice the vestiges of the old systems much.
[1] I don’t want to say that the question is bad but rather that without the historical context it seems like a question more specific to German than something like “why do adjectives come before the noun in English and after it in French” which ends up with an answer that is roughly general history plus “that’s just how it happened”.
I personally liked the reply further down the stack that said the German order is more useful in context of counting. You put the digit that changes with every count first and the one that stays the same for a while second (or mention it only when it changes). Because you don't typical count methodically like this if the number of things counted is large, this system only obtains for two-digit numbers. This is just a hypothesis, but I thought it was the most interesting answer.
I do the same thing in English, especially when counting to estimate time. I'm not thinking "twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two" I'm thinking "twenty, -one, -two'.
I think I prefer English's ordering for that. When I say "twenty, -one," it sounds like twenty-one, but as it's the twenty-first item that's not terribly confusing. Were it "neun-, zwanzig" it sounds a bit more like "neunundzwanzig."
I suppose that problem just moves to English if you're counting down, though. shrug
All the top answers are similarly awful, just smug bleating and ignoring the question. If someone doesn't know the etymological history, they shouldn't say anything!
Used to be like that in Norway. Some older people will still say "two-and-forty", "eight-and-seventy", instead of "forty-two", "seventy-eight", etc.
In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.
This change was called "The new counting method", and describes how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.
Sound a bit inconsistent - why weren't 10 - 20 also changed? Would have been great to have a language that's consistent all the way through as far as counting is concerned :)
I have nowhere enough knowledge in linguistics to properly explain this, but numbers between 10 and 20 have their own unique pronouncement which sound quite incorrect if inverted. Not too different from English, 10,11,12 have their own endings, while 13 to 19 end with a "ten" - similar to the English "teen". But saying "three-and-ten","four-and-ten" etc. doesn't sound right at all, in our language.
It's after this that you get "twenty-one, twenty-two, ... " and up to "ninety-nine" - which can also be pronounced "one-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, ..." up to "nine-and-ninety".
Back when the Spanish had driven the Moors south monks were picking over the wonderful libraries they had left behind, one of the treasures they discovered was what we now call arabic numbers - but they screwed up, they took the numbers as they saw them whole into their writing system. They took numbers meant to be written in a right to left writing system into a left to right system without reversing them.
Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in business - when you add numbers together the result can be written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space for the answer to fit into.
But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness - took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the original arabic way of doing it was right
Counterpoint: when talking or skimming text, the exact number is often not especially important to most of the audience, but the most significant digit or two are.
If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.
To know the magnitude of the most significant digit, you have to scan the whole number anyways. Looking for this info at the end of the number would be just as natural if you were used to it.
I'm no historian, but that explanation doesn't make sense to me, for two reasons:
* Pre-decimal numeral systems in use at that time (Roman/Greek/whatever numerals) were already written biggest-left to smallest-right, and had been so for more than a thousand years.
* Arabic numerals were invented in India, and Indian languages are written left-to-right.
On the other hand, network byte order is big endian, so now we typically have a little endian devices converting to and from big endian to talk to each other.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but despite its stupid order, I think M-D-Y makes complete sense for (American) English.
Some languages (or dialects of English) say "twelve/the twelveth (of) January 2022", so 12-01-2022 is the obvious notation. Many English dialects (the majority, given that it's how America does it?) would say "January twelveth, 2022", so 01-12-2022.
It's not that the notation is spun around, some versions of English just pronounce the dates backwards! This is the exact opposite of the question asked about numbers, where English (usually, mostly) follows the "logical" order.
As language is subjective, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to pronounce and order things. The West doesn't use lakh and crore, but there's no reason why the short scale is any better. People just decided to say things one way and stick to it.
You could be Canada. MM-DD-YYYY? DD-MM-YYYY? Unless you're in Quebec, you never have a clue. Government officially recommends YYYY-MM-DD due to this, but in the real world it's wild west.
I recently realized that M-D-Y makes a lot more sense than we give it credit for. Date formats needn't be about the cardinality of the units, in this case it's about spoken language. The M-D-Y format simply follows the order of the words in (EDIT: American) English. We say January 4th, 1970. Try reading D-M-Y in (EDIT: American) English and you will quickly realize that it doesn't make sense. I suspect most other spoken languages use 4th January, 1970 so D-M-Y feels more natural to them.
EDIT: I'm sorry if I offended you by equating American English with English. Point taken. I misspoke. The point remains.
Yeah, and you also see e.g. news anchors making mistakes in translation saying things like (Dutch) "Ze investeerden een biljoen". Turning a billion into a trillion.
And I also heard that Biden wants to pump a "triljoen" in the economy (quintillion)
Million (10^6) / milliard (10^9) / billion (10^12) is, or at least was, common in British English, where American English is million / billion / trillion.
Numbers above 999 million were typically written as, e.g., "thousand million (10^9), million million (10^12), etc.
Long scale also has billiard and trilliard.
American usage seems to be dominant now, the UK officially converted in 1974.
In general, languages differ in syntactic structure on the level of word order. For example, in Latin, word order a bit free form, things could be moved around quite a bit and still make sense to the listener. Probably allowed for some interesting creativity and poetics.
In English, I would say about a book, "the book on the table". In another language, it may be "the on-the-table book."
There's even a slight semantic difference where the later example somewhat directly gives the book the property of being "on-the-table". IIRC from my school days, that example resembles Japanese construction, but please someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a long time since my comp ling course work.
Interestingly Norwegian used to spell out numbers in the same order as German, but reformed this in the 1950s when telephone numbers became widespread:
I guess having a dedicated Språkrådet to oversee the development of the Norwegian language and a single broadcasting service(NRK) made the roll-out of this possible.
Actually, this is a modern thing. In the old German language (pre-1800) the numbers were spelled in the correct order in the areas where Hochdeutsch was spoken, with the single digit being at the end.
Also some early books from the era directly after the 30 jaehrige Krieg still use the different way of spelling numbers (e.g. from Eva Hartner comes to mind).
Einhundert-Zwanzig-und-Eins is still a number everybody understands, and it is also accepted in written form on bank transfer checks.
So I'd say just go ahead and use it this way :) the more people use this way of spelling numbers, the more likely it is that the language will adapt and change (back).
Readit News
Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.
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.
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"
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 :)
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.
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?
Honderd-vijf-en-zeventig. Hundred five and seventy.
We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa).
Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."
English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences.
I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.
I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.
I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers
German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".
Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.
Zwanzigeins could mean 20 1 or 21. The only thing that differentiates “20 1” from “21” is the duration of the delay between 20 and 1…
Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system, but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up.
Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness with the other party before the dictation starts.
So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs quickly.
Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to dictate it digit by digit and call it a day.
So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more problems than it solves.
Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.
Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um". Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not important or implied by context, which you can't do if you just say the numbers.
EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".
"Tien voor half vijf" (ten before half five) is indeed 4:20.
"Tien over half vijf" (ten after half five) is 4:40.
Then when it's 4:45, it's "kwart voor vijf" (quarter before five).
I always have to think about it before I say it.
I think in the UK they use half five as 5:30? Half past five basically. In NL it's half way towards five, maybe the Dutch are forward looking?
The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...
Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...
Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...
What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find:
"About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.
What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find:I guess America didn’t go with “Seven and four score years ago...” though
The problem also exists in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s
Many European languages have the long scale, English is the odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still classify that as a European language.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale
First time I ever heard someone say that about English!
We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual digits for large numbers in any language.
Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems. And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more logical the way it is in English or other languages.
Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021) and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later with all its advantages.
I think the answer is that languages didn’t traditionally have base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting, and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think, 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think). So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1] question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new arithmetic system and people don’t really notice the vestiges of the old systems much.
[1] I don’t want to say that the question is bad but rather that without the historical context it seems like a question more specific to German than something like “why do adjectives come before the noun in English and after it in French” which ends up with an answer that is roughly general history plus “that’s just how it happened”.
I think I prefer English's ordering for that. When I say "twenty, -one," it sounds like twenty-one, but as it's the twenty-first item that's not terribly confusing. Were it "neun-, zwanzig" it sounds a bit more like "neunundzwanzig."
I suppose that problem just moves to English if you're counting down, though. shrug
In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.
This change was called "The new counting method", and describes how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.
It's after this that you get "twenty-one, twenty-two, ... " and up to "ninety-nine" - which can also be pronounced "one-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, ..." up to "nine-and-ninety".
Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in business - when you add numbers together the result can be written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space for the answer to fit into.
But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness - took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the original arabic way of doing it was right
If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.
Are you skipping because bicycles are SUPER popular during the pandemic and you don't want to fit into the crowd?
* Pre-decimal numeral systems in use at that time (Roman/Greek/whatever numerals) were already written biggest-left to smallest-right, and had been so for more than a thousand years. * Arabic numerals were invented in India, and Indian languages are written left-to-right.
3 482 975 is "dreimillionenvierhundertzweiundachzigtausendneunhundertfünfundsiebzig"
which is in pseudo English:
"three million four hundred two and eighty thousand nine hundred five and seventy"
Also beware of (German -> English):
Million -> million
Milliarde -> billion
Billion -> trillion
Billiarde -> quadrillion
etc.
But who are we to laugh at them, the American date notation (M-D-Y) is just as weird.
Some languages (or dialects of English) say "twelve/the twelveth (of) January 2022", so 12-01-2022 is the obvious notation. Many English dialects (the majority, given that it's how America does it?) would say "January twelveth, 2022", so 01-12-2022.
It's not that the notation is spun around, some versions of English just pronounce the dates backwards! This is the exact opposite of the question asked about numbers, where English (usually, mostly) follows the "logical" order.
As language is subjective, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to pronounce and order things. The West doesn't use lakh and crore, but there's no reason why the short scale is any better. People just decided to say things one way and stick to it.
Dead Comment
EDIT: I'm sorry if I offended you by equating American English with English. Point taken. I misspoke. The point remains.
Yeah, and you also see e.g. news anchors making mistakes in translation saying things like (Dutch) "Ze investeerden een biljoen". Turning a billion into a trillion.
And I also heard that Biden wants to pump a "triljoen" in the economy (quintillion)
Million (10^6) / milliard (10^9) / billion (10^12) is, or at least was, common in British English, where American English is million / billion / trillion.
Numbers above 999 million were typically written as, e.g., "thousand million (10^9), million million (10^12), etc.
Long scale also has billiard and trilliard.
American usage seems to be dominant now, the UK officially converted in 1974.
The "correct" modern way is the same as in English.
nine hundred and seventy five?
Dead Comment
In general, languages differ in syntactic structure on the level of word order. For example, in Latin, word order a bit free form, things could be moved around quite a bit and still make sense to the listener. Probably allowed for some interesting creativity and poetics.
In English, I would say about a book, "the book on the table". In another language, it may be "the on-the-table book."
There's even a slight semantic difference where the later example somewhat directly gives the book the property of being "on-the-table". IIRC from my school days, that example resembles Japanese construction, but please someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a long time since my comp ling course work.
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_nye_tellem%C3%A5ten
I guess having a dedicated Språkrådet to oversee the development of the Norwegian language and a single broadcasting service(NRK) made the roll-out of this possible.
In German, it's even funnier because of the 'wrong order': https://youtu.be/gjPmUUCdLHw (hats off to the translators!)
I would say I use the old way in all situations except when I read out phonenumbers.
Also some early books from the era directly after the 30 jaehrige Krieg still use the different way of spelling numbers (e.g. from Eva Hartner comes to mind).
Einhundert-Zwanzig-und-Eins is still a number everybody understands, and it is also accepted in written form on bank transfer checks.
So I'd say just go ahead and use it this way :) the more people use this way of spelling numbers, the more likely it is that the language will adapt and change (back).