four-twenty-ten

[Grisu]

What's strange is that in Belgium, another French-speaking country, they use septante, octante and nonante for 70, 80 and 90, and that makes much more sense since it's like seventy, eighty and ninety.

in switzerland they use septante, huitante and nonante

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

yeah, that always annoys the hell out of me, especially since we do it differently here. we do the half to three stuff the same, but do the quarters the other way around
so in switzerland it's a quarter past 1, while the germans would say a quarter 2. (we usually use the hour that is closer, so 13.45 would be a quarter to 2 for us, while it would be three quarters 2 for the germans)
whenever I schedule something with a german I have to make sure that what I understood is actually what he meant

 

[Rossiya]

Interesting way of saying goodbye. "I'm leaving you in God's hands!"

Don't tell the British Muslims that "Goodbye" is short for "God be with you"! They'll start having a moan by saying how racist this is, and they will ask for it to be changed to something like "Allabye". You know, never mind about the 90 odd % of British natives, so long as everything caters to Allah, and the 2.7% of British who are Islamic, it's all good.

 

[Leifmk]

What is a declension, pray tell?

It's when nouns (and pronouns, adjectives, etc.) are inflected (i.e. take different forms) to indicate features such as number, gender, grammatical case, etc. Many modern languages (German, Finnish, Russian, etc.) have extensive case systems; in these languages, you can tell by the form of a word which function it has in the sentence. English has only retained declension by number, and some vestiges of case declension in personal pronouns (i/me/mine, he/him/his, etc.)

I don't think declensions are stupid at all.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Hmm...

Arabic has a few interesting things. For instance, numbers 1-99 are read like "four-and-twenty" or "eight-and-thirty." Until rather recently, all numbers were read in order of ascending place value, so ١٤٥٨٩ (14589) would be read "nine and eighty and five hundred and four thousand and ten thousand" or "nine and eighty and five hundred and fourteen thousand," but now it is read "fourteen thousand and five hundred and nine and eighty." I don't know why.

In addition, the Arabic word for "twenty" means "two tens," but the words for 30-90 mean "threes," "fours," "fives," "sixes," and so on.

Someone was talking about quarters (of an hour) being a common measure of time in Swedish. In Arabic, we use both quarters and thirds of an hour; but unlike Swedish we always say "of an hour."