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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, t
by TrackerFF 5y ago
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.
- qayxc 5y agoSound 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 :)
- oldsecondhand 5y agoFun fact: Hungarian doesn't have special names for the numbers 11-19.
- TrackerFF 5y agoI 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".
- everydayDonut 5y agoI wish we just said 'ten-four' etc. instead of 'fourteen' which sounds almost exactly like 'fourty'. Especially over the phone someone could easily mistake one for the other