NATLANG: One And A Half

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 14:34:58 -0400, Carsten Becker
<naranoieati@...> wrote:

>On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:32:25 +0300, Dan Sulani <dansulani@...> wrote:
>
>>    Are there natlangs where there _are_ simple terms for things like
>>"one and a half"? How about anyone's conlang(s)?
>
>Maybe someone mentioned it already, but German has "anderthalb" or
>"eineinhalb" -- OK, the latter is just the three words written as one and
>the second is a dialectical, though widespread variation. As for me, I'm
>using "anderthalb" [And6t."hAlp] all the time. My mum once told me that
>Allemanic as it is spoken in Lörrach and surroundings (at the end of the
>southwestern tip of Germany) has "fünfviertel" ?[fYm"f:i6tl=]. Our Swiss
>people might know that term as well.
Never heard of it. In the Bernese dialect, we mostly use "anderhalb"
['aN:r"hawb_0] or "einehalb" ['ein@"hawb_0].

The word "ander" meant 'second', and according to the etymology-Duden, the
original meaning of "anderthalb" (the -t- probably inserted by analogy to
other ordinal numbers) was 'the second half one', though this doesn't really
make sense to me, I imagine that it should be understood as 'half the second
one'.

The proceding is similar in German indications of half hours: 'one and a
half' is expressed as 'half the two' (halb zwei). Indeed, in certain regions
of Germany, people also use 'three quarter the two' (dreiviertel zwei) in
order to express '1.45' and even 'a quarter the two' (viertel zwei) for
1.15. But many German speaking wouldn't understand the latter.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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