Re: numeration system

On 16 Dec 2004, at 8.37 am, John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
>> In the early day of the telephone, it was found that "nought" and
>> "four"
>> were readily confused over bad lines, so people got into the habit of
>> saying "oh" for 0 ("zero" is becoming quite often used nowadays also).
>
> The telephone is still reckoned an American invention, I think, and
> "nought"
> for 0 is rare here, so I don't think that's the explanation.  I think
> it
> more likely that "zero" was the only disyllabic number (with the
> marginal
> exception of "seven"), and using "oh" made it easier to keep to the
> rhythm.
I was under the understanding that Americans didn't generally use 'oh'
for zero? Mistaken? (Aussies, at least around Melbourne, tend to use
'zero' or 'oh', rarely 'naught', which is an archaic or British word,
or the round player/glyph in naughts-and-crosses. I think a majority
tends to pronounce 'zero' with the same vowel as 'pretty', but 'oh' is
by far the most common.)

> The rhythm of telephone numbers is very important to North Americans:
> we expect to hear "(one), two one two, five five five, six six six six"
> with pauses as noted.  When the pauses are omitted or come in the wrong
> places (as when a non-NA caller leaves his number on a message), the
> resulting number is very hard to understand without several
> repetitions.
> All numbers are exactly ten digits long, of which the last seven digits
> are the local number, so this pattern is fixed.
Poor Americans would be horrified by the Australian system. Excluding
the country code and including the area code (with a leading zero),
numbers are ten digits long, with the exception of new 13 numbers
(which are 13x xxx or 13 xx xx) and 1800 numbers (for some reason
recently arbitrary long numbers have been given out; Lift Plus (the
drink) had a competition a few months ago that involved ringing the
number 1800 LIFT PLUS). But every different number kind is written (and
read) differently, except that 0 tends to be read as 'oh'... OTOH, if
you started saying a fixed no. like a mobile no., everyone would have a
fit. Unlike the American system, we don't touch our country code with a
ten-foot pole, unless you add a number your mobile phone gives you.

Henrik:
> 'zwo' is originally a different form of the number two in those days
> when it had declension.  Just like English 'two' I assume it derives
> from the masculine accusative form.
I thought MnE 'two' /tu:/ < ME 'two' /to:/ < 'two' /twO:/ < OE 'twa'
/twa:/ < PG *twaI, cf 'who' /hu:/ < OE 'hwa' /hwa:/. That was just a
guess, but German zwei and Icelandic tveir seem to suggest a PG form of
*twai- IIRC.

--
Tristan.

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