4 ms·
Omg! 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
by SilasX 10mo ago
Omg! 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 10mo agoSen’s good to me!
- oniony 10mo agoMay as well just use sept from French.
- SilasX 10mo 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 10mo 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.
- SilasX 9mo agoThe whole point is that you don't need to get anyone to consciously follow any proposal, you just push common usage in the direction of saying "sen" to the point that it becomes correct, and you can take action now to assist it, without having to coordinate, and without breaking your existing communication. With respect, your comments read as ignoring all the points I brought up in in order to show off knowledge you're proud to have.