13 ms·
>Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less ofte
by xxs 6y ago
>Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall".
one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.
- ajuc 6y agoI guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto). I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).
- Symbiote 6y agoMost English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases. en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.
- OJFord 6y agoBut that's just a way of pronouncing large numbers; that's still saying '180 centimetres', not '1 [metre and] 80 centimetres'.
- bhaak 6y agoAre you sure? Intuitively I would have said, that "I'm one eighty tall" is an abbreviation for "I'm one [meter] [and] 80 [centimeter] tall". Thinking about it, if I measure something with a folding ruler, I would more naturally say "it's one meter eighty long" (German native speaker here, as already said elsewhere, with other languages YMMV). But the point still stands. In metric, you can slap the numbers together or separate them, convert them to different units or sprinkle easily units in between or not. It all works. At worst it is just moving the decimal point around or adding/removing zeros. Very easily done in your head.
- ajuc 6y agoIn German would you say "I'm one four and 80" for 184cm? Cause that's confusing :)
- bhaak 6y agoNot confusing to a native speaker :-) But yes, that's exactly how you would say it in German. There might be some part of the brain reserved to parse that sentence as "I'm (one) (four and 80)" but this doesn't feel weird or confusing at all. Telephone numbers on the other hand are more confusing. Luckily you don't need to say them out loud anymore these days.
- lsinger 6y agoI’d say “one eighty-four” but of course the problem is that in german we mix up the order of the tens and ones. And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).
- qayxc 6y agoInterestingly, even in English it was common to say things like "five-and-twenty"; it's considered archaic now.
- OJFord 6y agoSuch as in the nursery rhyme you've now put in my head! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
- OJFord 6y agoWell I suppose the nice thing about metric is that it doesn't matter! You may be convincing me though, since in feet and inches it does matter, and it would mean as you say - 'looks about 10 11' means 10'11", not 1011". In the UK though we generally don't mix metres and centimetres - '1 8' would mean '1.8' not '1.08', though I'd say the decimal point would rarely be elided, so that's clear. So I just wouldn't say 1 80 about metres unless the question was 'how many metres' - and then I'd mean 180m.
- coccinelle 6y agoFrench people would most commonly say « un mètre quatre-vingt » meaning one meter eighty, centimeters being implied at the end.
- lucideer 6y agoIf we're talking about what's common in English, I think it's a little odd to discuss European metric habits in the context of the English language. While English is a "lingua franca" in Western countries, the two main native-English-speaking countries in Europe are very recent metric adoptees. Ireland didn't finish adopting the metric system until 2005, so still use imperial units for many colloquial uses; e.g. human height & weight. The U.K. is further behind, and if you couple that with the nationalistic associations the imperial system will have there, colloquial uses are even more widespread. I think metric use in English is only going to become more natural and fluent with generational use.
- xxs 6y agoMalta should be included too; They used to be part of the UK till 1964, they still drive on the left side, so no idea how they feel/speak about metric.
- lucideer 6y agoYeah. I prefixed my country listing with "the two main" as I know Malta is also another but I know much much less about habits & metrication there. It looks to be quite complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement Also, I think English, while an official language of Malta, is much less dominant than it would be in Ireland (or the UK).
- xxs 6y agoIt's been 2 decades since my visit there (totally loved it). English was spoken everywhere, even though Maltese was common as well.