four-twenty-ten

nonconformist said:
No it isn't but in English you go the way it's shortest.

mrtn said:
Swedish numbers are logical.

However, I can't say I like the English time keeping system, most notably that you can't really talk about quarters, and get people to understand that you're not talking about coins, but about time.

"Kvart i fyra" A quarter (i e 15 minutes) to four.
"Kvart över fyra" A quarter past four.
"Halv fyra" Half past three.
"Vi ses om en kvart" We'll meet in a quarter.

A similar thing is that you don't talk about half-years in English. You don't say "I haven't seen him for a half-year" which is what I'd say in Swedish. Bloody 6 month bloody exactness...

Odd, because in my experance with time, "quarter 'till [hour]" is far more common than "45 after [hour]" or even "[hour] 45"

The only one from that list I would have to think twice about is "we'll meet in a quarter"
 
Paradigne said:
Is that italian?? It's very similar to spanish. Germany does similar with eleven and twelve being different then 13 being 3-10...

Unfortunately what I do know is spoken (and badly) so I won't be spelling it...
Look at Spanish for 16 and all those after that, it's te same. Dieciseis, diecisiete y dieciocho...

(FYI, that's "16, 17, and 18").
 
Just curious: I almost never use an analog clock anymore (I have mostly digital clocks and watches). Whenever someone asks me the time though, I always respond with either the hour, quarter past/till, os the half hour. I always round the time. Anyone else do this?

example:
Some people I know will look at their watch and say its 4:11. I would say quarter after four
 
i always do it in 5's, so its 5 past, 10 past, a quarter past, 20 past, etc.
 
The thing that has always annoyed me with the PM/AM system is that 12 AM and 12 PM are not where they's supposed to be, meaning 12 PM comes after 11AM. I've scheduled quite a few meetings at midnight because of that.

The 24-hour based system is much more convenient IMHO.
 
augurey said:
...The only one from that list I would have to think twice about is "we'll meet in a quarter"
We talk about three quarters too. "I'll meet you in three quarters and talk about something that happened half a year ago."
 
Quinzy said:
they are where they're supposed to be, just not where you want them to be :)

It's just that concept of not having a 0-hour that messes with my mind.
Like in the 24-hour you go from 23:59 to 0:00, but here 12:00AM is not the last hour of the day, but actually the first of the next day.

Do you see what I mean?
 
Masquerogue: i know what you're saying :) i was only joking! it can be a bid fiddley if your not used to it.

ironduck: you're welcome!
 
Named numbers in English that fall outside of the pattern:

Dozen: 12
Baker's dozen: 13
Score: 20
Quire: 24 or 25
Small gross: 120
Gross: 144
Great gross: 1728
Bale: 5000

Eleven, twelve and the 'teens also don't strictly follow the pattern.
 
Korean has two entirely different number sets. One, called Sino-Korean (as it is very similar to Chinese) is very common sense. 1-10 is: il, i, sam, sa, oh, yuk, chil, pal, gu, ship. So ship is 10, then 11 is ship-il (ten-one), 12 is ship-i, etc. 20 is i-ship (two-ten).

What's weird about it is when you get into higher numbers. In English we have lexical units for one, ten, hundred, and thousand. After thousand, we only have a new lexical unit every 3 digits: thousand, million, billion, etc. In Sino-Korean, there is a new lexical unit for 10,000 too. So where we say 100,000 is a hundred thousand, in Korean it's ten-ten thousand. A million is hundred-ten thousand, 10 million is thousand-ten thousand. Then at 100 million Korean has a new lexical item, so 1 billion is ten-hundred million.

THEN, Korean has a set of numbers that are pure Korean, completely different. 1-10 goes hana, dul, set, net, tasot, yosot, ilgop, yodol, ahup, yol. 11 and 12, etc, work the same as sino-korean, but pure korean has entirely new lexical items for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90. The word for 20 is not etymologically related to the word for 2, for example. Pure Korean numbers stop at 99.

The two sets of numbers are used for different things. Money is always Sino-Korean, counting things is usually pure Korean, whereas when you say time, the hour is a pure korean number and the minutes are given in Sino-Korean.
 
nonconformist said:
The Germans also have the sillines to express their times as minutes to the hour.


So what is half past two, to them is half to three, and what is quater past five is three-quarters to six :ack:

Russians do the same. Even at say 6:10, they will often say "fifty minutes to seven."
 
I am surprised nobody has mentioned a "gross" yet. 12 sets of 12 somethings! For example, a gross of bottle rockets is 12 packages bundled together with 12 bottle rockets in each package, or 144 bottle rockets.
 
So, is your language "rational" or twisted? Do you pronounce 70 seventy, three-twenty-ten, sixty-ten or something else?

As far as numbers go, English is pretty straight.

But with a lot of other things it's pretty messed.

Nu-uh. Any languages with declensions is worse.

What is a declension, pray tell?:eek:

English is so nice and easy in terms of grammar.

But pronunciation and spelling is so bollocksed up it's almost mind warping.

Funny sidebar: Most of my mexican friends never realized that Adios (goodbye) is just a contraction of to (a) and God (dios)

Yeah when I started studying spanish I noticed this too.

Interesting way of saying goodbye. "I'm leaving you in God's hands!":lol:
 
Grand lives on as slang but IIRC it historically meant thousand. Where pony and monkey meaning 25 and 500 came from I've no idea.
 
Russian numbers are pretty strait forward.
even eleven and twelve are 10+1 and 10+2. The only number that are strangely named are 40 (sorok) and 90 (devenosto). 40 is strange because it does not follow from for at all 4. 90 is expressed as 100-10.
 
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