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Using fewer syllables to express numbers
- jihadjihad 9mo ago> 773466 > two hundred ten cubed twelfths plus twelve cubed minus twelve Intuitive!
- driggs 9mo agoThis website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility. As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be easiest to do it in hexadecimal-style, but somehow I can't bring myself to count a part out as: > one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, nine, a, b, c, d, e, f, g If only I could convince musicians to use zero-based indexing instead of one-based.
- stronglikedan 9mo agoI'd reverse the second half and count it as: one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, eight, sev, six, five , four, three, two, one.
- bongodongobob 9mo ago[dead]
- chrisweekly 9mo agoThat reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my "flowstate" playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat with polyrhythms that caught my ear. I tried counting along and realized the primary beat is in 7/8, and in confirming it found myself counting, "one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, one,...". 1. https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbKmz825T3iS_X35YOqLtg https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbK... 2. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=lYru6u71RDagpMK6RS4eug&pi=p9qOGZlcTAGy3 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
- bediger4000 9mo agoGiven all of music's esoteric conventions and historical vestiges, I'm surprised they don't zero index. Octaves divided into thirds and fifths, who decided that was ok?
- driggs 9mo agoOof, "zero" is two syllables so we'll have to pronounce it "null".
- pluralmonad 9mo agoZed is probably fine.
- oniony 9mo agoOr use the preexisting naught.
- SilasX 9mo agoOmg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup: MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive load of saying it. So native Chinese speakers are much better at it than Spanish. English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable ... except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause a massive amount of good, when summed over all the times people have to remember numbers. The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-compatible way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just commit to pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word as se--n), and eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation and codified as standard. As long as the listener is expecting a number there, they will automatically fill in the missing sounds and parse it as a 7. Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or sen." Who's with me?
- altairprime 9mo agoSen’s good to me!
- oniony 9mo agoMay as well just use sept from French.
- SilasX 9mo agoThat runs into the issue I was talking about in the proposal, where it's not backward-compatible and requires people to be informed of and sympathetic to the renaming. "Sen" will already be accepted as referring to 7, without such coordination, so long as it has enough context to be parsed as a number.
- oniony 9mo agoI doubt anyone would associate 'sen' with seven: 'sev' would be much more obvious. Whereas 'sept' is already used as a prefix within English to mean seven such as September (Roman seventh month), septuplets (seven children in a single birth) and septuagenarian (a 70 year old). Anyhow, this discussion is moot as nobody is going to follow any proposal.
- toast0 9mo agoI was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I never had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted that high), it just gets two half-duration notes compared to the others. NBD Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's wrong with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we would did one eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision, but I forget the triplet division. The drummers all seemed to have a common syntax for different note length patterns without numbers, which you could probably drop in between numbered beats too.
- driggs 9mo agoBecause that's for half-time!
- altairprime 9mo agoIt helps to count from a as either zero or one (use “o” as zero then) rather than a as ten. Won’t help you with hexadecimal compatibility if you take the former but it should overcome the brain obstacle, and scales up to x/26ths at least.
- IsTom 9mo agoPersonally I prefer to use non-numerical word phrases (especially in odd meters) with the right number of syllables instead. If you want to you can even place accents where they're supposed to be with right words.
- drob518 9mo agoIf you’re counting it fast, you can run things together a bit: One, two, three, four, five, six, sev, nate
- chrismorgan 9mo agoI’ve settled on “sen” for seven when I want it short. Zero could also do with being a monosyllable, but at least we have “oh” and “nil” for that. Then there are letters. 25 of them are monosyllables (though a few like “aitch” and “kyoo” cut it fine), then w (double you) is three syllables, and not even right, it’s double vee. Unfortunately, once I mysteriously manage to right these two wrongs, power will go to my head, and I’ll go ahead with other spelling reforms and abolishing a few stupid letters like c and x and replacing them with others for all those poor fricatives that have been loaded onto -h digraphs. And while all that’s going on, I’ll be learning Telugu better, and it will laugh at me with its average of 2.5 syllables per digit.
- idiotsecant 9mo agoW='dub'. It's not even a made up thing, plenty of people said 'dubdubdub dot' back in the days when people spoke urls aloud like savages.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- throw-the-towel 9mo agoIn French, all numbers between 10 and 15 except 14 are monosyllabic! So, you just might say "dix, onze, douze" and so on. (Quatorze will have to become 'torze or something.)
- sublinear 9mo agoI'm having a hard time thinking of a good time signature that accents on a subdivision smaller than an eighth. Can you give an example? I also don't know any musicians that would count everything. I usually hear "and", "and" "uh", "ee" "and" "uh", etc. between the downbeats and numbers are typically used to count whole notes.
- chris_j 9mo agoIn my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.
- pimlottc 9mo agoI got one that ended with “minus ninety halves”. How is “ninety halves” better than “forty-five”?
- rdlw 9mo ago"Our first priority is to minimize sylliness, but I think our second priority should be to maximize silliness. And 'thirty squared twelfths' is certainly sillier."
- ch4s3 9mo agoI'd love to see this done for French numbers, and no cheating with huitante or nonante.
- jihadjihad 9mo agoCheating? At least it's still base-10!
- ch4s3 9mo agoThat's why it's cheating! Quatre-vingt-dix-sept is obviously the correct way to say 97.
- altairprime 9mo agoAnd fewer syllables for 970067! (I think?)
- xvilka 9mo agoUse Chinese to get the least amount of syllables.
- z2 9mo agoVery true, worst case is 2n-1 syllables for n digits.
- vincent-manis 9mo agoI tried "4765" (four syllables), and got "sixty-nine squared plus four" (6 syllables). The ICAO phonetic alphabet specifically pronounces "4" as "fouwer", and "9" as "niner", so as to increase redundancy on a noisy channel.
- moeffju 9mo agoYou got "four thou-sand se-ven hun-dred six-ty-five" :)
- vincent-manis 9mo agoNope, I got "four seven six five", which is exactly how I would read that number if it were a street address, or a phone extension, or an inumber, or the like. You will notice that the site doesn't give any context about the usage of these numbers.
- yencabulator 9mo agoFinnish averages pretty close to 1 syllable per digit when you want it to. Here's a Finn counting 1, 2, 3, ... 87 (and ending in very Finnish way): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G57Zp7ZXYik https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G57Zp7ZXYik