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To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
by p49k 9y ago
To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yAnonymous 9y agoUnlike the German and French versions, that doesn't make any sense at all.
- ealexhudson 9y agoIt does. It's a contraction of "half-past two".
- barry0079 9y agoIt's a shortening of "half past two". Or half the hour past two of the clock.
- elthran 9y agoIt's a colloquial contraction of "half past 2". To me, the German makes no sense - half of 2 is 1. Agreed though that the French is the most easily understood internationally.
- netsharc 9y agoIf you think of the minute hand needing to complete the full circle to reach 2, "Half two" means the minute hand has only completed half that circle, so it's 1:30. I've even heard of "three quarters (of) two" in German, which means 1:45.
- Lev1a 9y agoYou probably mean the German expression "dreiviertel zwei". This expression is however not used everywhere in Germany because in other regions it may be said as - "viertel vor zwei" (approx. "quarter to two") or - "Dreizehn (Uhr) fünfundvierzig"/"Ein Uhr fünfundvierzig" (The exact time as you would read it off of a (digital) clock/watch) When I imagine it from the English-speakers perspective, I think "viertel" (quarter), "halb" (half) and "dreiviertel" (three quarters) are probably to be understood like this: "halb zwei" = "half two" = "1/2 2" = (2 - 1 hour) + ((1/2) * 1 hour) = 1.5 = 01:30
- dbrgn 9y ago"halb zwei" (half two) in German is to be understood as "one half of the second hour has passed". There are actually regions that use terms like "dreiviertel zwei" (three fourths of two) to indicate 01:45 and "viertel zwei" (one fourth of two) to indicate 01:15. Especially the latter confuses people from other parts of Germany, because regular high German uses the terms "viertel vor zwei" (a quarter to two) and "viertel nach zwei" (a quarter past two).
- gpvos 9y agoAnd one problem is that no-one on the European continent learns that at school or hears that on TV. I got quite confused when I recently started to travel to the UK and Ireland a bit more often.
- Symbiote 9y agoThe difference between English and German, and later the difference between English and Danish, was emphasized when I was learning the two languages. Almost all Danish people know that "halv to" is "half one".
- vidarh 9y agoMaybe it's an age thing and that it's relatively new in the UK - I certainly never hear about it when I learned English in Norway from the mid 80's onwards. Some searches also seems to support that this is something that at least did not become common until the 80's or 90's in the UK, and it makes sense that schools various places would lag behind.
- Symbiote 9y agoThe Oxford English Dictionary [1, university/library subscription needed] gives the definition "In stating the time of day, etc. = half an hour past the hour named." and a quotation from 1791: > "a1791 F. Grose Olio (1796) 107 C. Pray what's o' clock? W. It will be half ten." But until looking this up myself, I hadn't realised Americans and Australians always included the "past". Was your teacher British? -- Assuming you have some familiarity with Danish numbers, you might like another definition: "half, preceded or followed by an ordinal numeral, was formerly used to express a half-unit less than the corresponding cardinal numeral; thus Old English þridda healf, Middle English thridde half or half thrid = two and a half. Obsolete." Example (c1200 Ormulum (Burchfield transcript) l. 13777) "Þatt sahh. & herrde daȝȝwhammliȝ. Hallf ferþe ȝer þe laferrd" so hallf ferþe means 3½, "halvfjerde". [1] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/83402 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/83402
- 9y ago
- inetknght 9y agoYou are thoroughly demonstrating that "[common] sense" is a product of environment and teaching; what makes sense to one person does not necessarily make sense to another.
- asveikau 9y agoMaybe this sounds weird, I have no idea if it has any basis in fact, but I have noticed when you ask Google to translate between two non-English languages, it sometimes introduces errors that an English speaker would make. I've therefore wondered if they somehow, either deliberately or indirectly through some model, translate to English as an intermediate step.
- bwasti 9y agoYou may be spot on :) http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/google-translate-adds-nmt-to-8-language-pairs-unveils-zero-shot-translation http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/goog... “…a multilingual NMT model trained with Portuguese>English and English>Spanish examples can generate reasonable translation for Portuguese>Spanish although it has not seen any data for that language pair. We show that the quality of zero shot language pairs can easily be improved with little additional data of the language pair in question,” the paper states.
- asveikau 9y agoThis is a weird thing because you'd be hard pressed to find two languages as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, and whatever this paper has to say on the topic it'd be inevitable that the English translation in the middle would be "lossy". I sometimes get disappointed when people suggest that machine translation is a substitute for actually learning the languages. It's true that we have limited time in our lives to study languages, and the machine translations can be a quicker way to get the gist, or possibly open some doors. But go much beyond that, like claims I sometimes see that you can wear AR goggles and suddenly communicate like a native, and you set unreasonable expectations. Or perhaps imagine a world where the way to read Shakespeare is to put it through a machine and it tells you, "statistically, Shakespeare meant to say this". Is that really reading it?
- pjmlp 9y agoActually there are quite a few, if you include the variants spoken across the peninsula, Galician, Mirandese and Aragon are even closer to Portuguese than Spanish. :)
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoAnd this is very likely the reason for the mistake. See, Google Translate seems to take a shortcut to translating between language A and B, by translating from A to English and English to B. For instance, for the last five years or so I've been seeing GT translate the Greek word for "swallow", the bird, to the French word for "to swallow", the verb [1]. In Greek and French, the two words have nothing in common (Greek is helidoni/katapino, French is hirondele/avaler). But in English, they are homonyms (swallow/swallow). It seems that GT sees a Greek word, translates it in English, then finds a set of homonyms and simply chooses the translation that's most "likely", meaning the one that's used to most often- which of course means it gets one meaning wrong all the time. Last year Google made a big todo about its neural nets inventing an "interlingua", an intermediary language to which and from which all other languages it knows can be translated. In practice, I think this "interlingua" ends up being just plain old English. _________________ [1] Recently I started seeing the translation "machaon", a kind of butterfly, which Google translates in English as "swallowtail". "Avaler" is still available as an alternative.
- hardlianotion 9y agoThat reminds me of this famous work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke
- another-dave 9y ago> And this is very likely the reason for the mistake. See, Google Translate seems to take a shortcut to translating between language A and B, by translating from A to English and English to B. Although in this case, if you translate "halb zwei" from German→English it correctly translates it to "half past one".
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoSurely Google have a French–German pairing, though? There must be lots of works available in both languages.
- PeterisP 9y ago
- rconti 9y agoDoes it? "Half two" would certainly not be common in the US, but certainly folks are familiar with "quarter of 2" which would mean 1:45. If you told me it's "half two" I would assume it means 1:30, not 2:30, as a native (american) English speaker -- although I have taken a couple quarters of German in college so perhaps the German is sneaking in a little bit?
- wccrawford 9y agoAs a native (American) English speaker, "half two" is nonsense to me, but if I had to guess at a time the closest thing would be "half past two" (2:30), so I'd probably guess that first. I'd never heard anyone say "half until two" or "half to two" and they're both incredibly awkward. "quarter after", "half past", and "quarter til" are the ones we use.
- mattmanser 9y agoIs that an auto-correct typo or do you say "of"? It's "quarter to 2" in the UK. And "quarter past 2" means 02:15/14:15. It's also perfectly normal to just use "quarter to/past" without an hour, I might say "let's meet again at quarter past", referring to 12:15 if the time were 11:37.
- vidarh 9y agoAs a Norwegian I was also used to the German variation and it took me a long time to get used to the UK version, but yes, in the UK "half two" is unambiguously always half past two.