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I think Danish has a more complicated system. 1 - 20 is similar to most Germanic languages, by extension Indo European in general. But, then it gets weirder the
by memsom 6y ago
I think Danish has a more complicated system. 1 - 20 is similar to most Germanic languages, by extension Indo European in general. But, then it gets weirder the closer you get to 100:
20 - Tyve (Swedish tjugo, Norwegian: tjue) /
30 - Tredive (Swedish: trettio, Norwegian: tretti) /
40 - Fyrre (Swedish: fyrtio, Norwegian: førti) /
50 - Halvtreds (Swedish: femtio, Norwegian: femti) /
60 - tres (Swedish: sextio, Norwegian: seksti) /
70 - halvfjerds (Swedish: sjuttio, Norwegian: sytti) /
80 - firs (Swedish: åttio, Norwegian: åtti) /
90 - halvfems (Swedish: nittio, Norwegian: nitti) /
100 - hundrede (Swedish: hundra, Norwegian: hundre)
If I understand correctly, the numbers are contractions of longer words... for example, 60 is tres, sixtieth is tresindstyvende, which means something like "three lots of twenty"-th. Weird? Yeah. But no idea what halvfjerds means... it's making my brain hurt trying to work it out.
- memsom 6y agoOkay I googled it - and it does make sense. Apparently "halvanden" means one and a half (halv = half, andan = 2nd, but for this "2".) So, 50 is actually "halvtredsindstyve", which is ((3 - 0.5) * 20)... okay.. this is completely messed up! Only the Danes... only the Danes... making their language even less intelligible. ;-) For the record, 60 is tredsindstyve, which is 3 * 20.. at least that makes some sense. The issue comes that 70 is halvfjerdsindstyve ((4 - 0.5) * 20) and 80 is firsindstyve (4 * 20), but fjerd and fir look like different words! They inbuilt extra confusion to make it even harder! 90 is halvfemsindstyve ((5 - 0.5) * 20). It all makes some sense if you understand what is going on. Buy why?!?