Re: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systems from conlangs)

At 04:05 PM 9/15/03 -0400, you wrote:
>On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 03:46:48PM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> > FYI, Danish does something similar but not identical to French in counting
> > in twenties and half-twenties.  There were a lot of numerical issues for me
> > to get used to in speaking Danish.  They have a few interesting idioms for
> > telling time as well, and one of these would cause me to show up for
> > appointments at the wrong times until I had mastered it.
>
>Tell me about it.  The British use of, e.g., "half eight" to mean
>"half PAST eight" drives me nuts.  I automatically think of it in terms of
>the German "halb acht", which means SEVEN thirty, and therefore used to
>show up an hour early for meetings with my British boss before I got
>used to it.
In Danish, "halv otte" (lit. "half eight") also means seven-thirty.  This
took me some time to get used to.  I used to follow up by asking for the
time in pure *numbers* to be sure I had it right.  I had absolutely no idea
that the British used "half eight" to mean "half past eight."  "Half past
eight" is the only way to say it in America.  (I also had no idea that
German had the same idiom for it that Danish does.)  Danish "kvart over x"
meaning "a quarter past x" and "kvart i x" for "a quarter to x" gave me no
trouble.  Neither did "fem minuter i x" "five minutes to x" ("i" is
"in".)  But once you started getting into expressions like "fem minuter i
halv otte" "five minutes in half eight" and "fem minuter over halv otte"
"five minutes over half eight" for 7:25 and 7:35 respectively, I thought it
was getting to be a bit too much.

The one that made me show up at the wrong time, though, was trying to
function on a 24-hour clock, which I had never had to do before.

Isidora

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