It’s fucking far off. I can’t stress how bonkers your number naming is. I speak two romance languages and two Germanic ones, and I’ll not try French because this and many other bullshittery.
Ninety two is nine ten two anyway, it’s not that far off.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
French took it’s number system from Basque, which is at least more consistent since iirc in French 70 is 60+10 while the consistent logic should be 3*20+10.
Anyway, you say that twenty is far from twenty ->twen ten->second ten. 70 in Basque is hirurogeitahamar->hirur hogei ta hamar->hirugarren (third) hogei(twenty) eta(and) hamar(ten). It’s the same logic.
The only reason you say it’s bonkers is because you don’t understand. Different = wrong. Lmao.
Also, don’t fucking say that french is my language, I’m Basque Spaniard.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Ad hominem.
davidagain@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think you’re allowing this to make you angrier than you should.
You clearly speak English, which I think of as the mongrel child of two or three Germanic languages and a Romance one, and not in a good way, so I also think it’s the most fucked up and inconsistent one of the lot. The only thing it’s got going for it as a language is genderless nouns.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Not angry at all, thank you for the concern.
And yeah, English is terrible, the absolute divorce between writing and speaking being the most salient point for me. But it’s the lingua franca, you can’t not speak it if you want to interact in the world stage. But, for all its faults, I’m glad it replaced French in this role.
davidagain@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The invention of the printing press and of the dictionary at a time of great language change has been problematic for English spelling.
Why do you feel English is better than French? I think English has most of the problems of French and then a whole bunch of its own, but I’m interested in your perspective.
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Congratulations. You’ve just discovered how base 10 counting works.
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Not really. We are talking about how numbers are called in different languages. Other languages have actual names for twenty that aren’t a combination of digit+ten.
Basque is hogei, ten is hamar, two is bi, there is no phonetic similarity. The way language is created then informs how counting and numbers work.
Spanish has a proper distinct name for 20, but then is like english for 30 and above.
No need to be so passive aggressive while not understanding what I was trying to explain.
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I’m not being passive at all.
First off, the remark about French and 92 is a jab at French in particular. No other romance language for some reason stalls out at 70 and cobbles together the 80s and 90s. There is a modern word, IIRC “neufant” or something that’s closer to “nine tens.”
To your point, base 10 counting, which we use because of how many fingers our species has. Whether we use base 8, 10, 12, etc. counting, the fact remains that all counting uses incremental increases like base 10.
9 rolls over to 1 unit in the 10s column. 19 rolls over to 2 units in the 10s column.
So if we say “4 x 20” instead of 80, were suddenly creating a second, nested, base 20 counting system (confusingly, using base 10 numbers!) within our usual base 10 system. So it’s the same in the sense that we are using numbers in general, but different in that it anchors the counting base in a weird way.
Let’s say I run a restaraunt and make omlettes. I can make a 2 egg, 3 egg, or 4 egg omlette for you. But the 4 egg omlette is tiny. Why? Because for the 4 egg omlette I use quail eggs. But only for the 4 and 5 egg omlettes. Order a 6 egg omlette and you’re getting a half dozen chicken eggs in some 100 square meter omlette. Multiples of 4 and 5, always quail eggs. It’s sort of like that.
dondelelcaro@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The other word for twenty in English is score. Pretty rarely used, however.