Re: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systems fromconlangs)
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 16, 2003, 12:47 |
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En réponse à Nik Taylor :
>How far up do they do that? Do they go all the way to "nine and
>ninety"? What about "five and twenty and one hundred" for 125?
No, only units and tens are switched. Take Dutch for instance: 99 is
"negenennegentig" ("nine-and-ninety") but 125 is "honderd vijfentwintig"
("hundred five-and-twenty"). Note that "honderd" doesn't need a unit number
(unlike in English). If the system was completely inversed compared to
English or French, it wouldn't be that difficult. You'd just have to read
figures the other way round (Arabic does that, which explains why their
numbers look like they are written in the same order as ours. It's just
that right-to-left written numbers given in the order
units-tens-hundreds-thousands look like left-to-right numbers in the order
thoudands-hundreds-tens-units). But in Dutch, German and it seems Danish,
only the units and tens are inversed. It makes things sometimes confusing :)) .
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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