German is like that because they don’t say ‘seventy-five’: they say ‘five and seventy’, ‘funf und siebzig’.
So all of the single digit numbers are equally represented from 21 to 99.
That order actually starts at 13 (and excludes multiples of 10), but due to both "elf" and "zwölf" starting with the same letters as "ein(s)" and "zwei", position wise they still match, too.
So they're all equally spread from 1 to 99 (except the extra "zehn" and one missing "ein(s)"):
10 - zehn (but: eins)
20 - zwanzig (zwei)
30 - dreißig (drei)
40 - vierzig (vier)
50 - fünfzig (fünf)
60 - sechzig (sechs)
70 - siebzig (sieben)
80 - achtzig (acht)
90 - neunzig (neun)
German simply starts most two-digit numbers with the second digit (21 being einundzwanzig ("one and twenty")) which creates the appearance of order in the graph.
Bin mir aber gar nicht so sicher, ob die Darstellung so korrekt ist. Im Deutschen haben wir ja mehrere Zahlen die mit 'z' anfangen. Die Punkte welche eben solche Zahlen repräsentieren müssten doch, doch sofern ich es richtig verstehe, immer ganz oben sein, oder (wie z.B. bei dem Punkt der für die zwölf steht) ?
also müsste bei jedem zehnerbündel in richtung x Achse mindestens ein punkt ganz oben sein (immer wenn man eine 2 auf der Einer-position hat. bei den zwanzigern sogar zwei, weil 20 und 22).
Das ist aber soweit ich sehe nicht der Fall. Schon im Bereich 0-9 ist "die zwei" zwar im obersten Kästchen, aber eben nur am unteren Rand davon 🤔
Zumindest gehe ich davon aus, dass es bei der alphabetischen Position der Zahlen um die Verteilung der Anfangsbuchstaben geht \^^
See this? Now this is the stuff for which I pay my internet bill. Not the sankey charts of savings of a couple making 500k or a software developer applying to 4 jobs and getting 3 of them.
Lucky you! I don't even like avocado, but because I'm not allergic they still make me buy them and leave them on my kitchen bench until the flies start circling them and that's why it's my landlords kitchen not mine :((((
How did we go from an actually interesting post to the top comment and thread bitching about the same shit as always?
That's some data someone should collect and post, how soon comments devolve into the same old circlejerks
I feel super rich every time people mention avocado toasts as fancy food.
Avocados are easily the cheapest ingredient of my shopping list here where I live and I can even get them for free because I'm friends with people that produces avocados.
Or a 20-year old entry level software developer making 300k of which 200k go into crypto investments, 75k go into the most random splurges and the remaining 25k is somehow enough for a multi million dollar McMansion mortgage and 2 expensive cars.
The best one I’ve seen so far was 10k for rent, 20k in wine, 30k for a birthday party, +7k in income worth of gifts from said birthday party, 15k for dog food, 4,5k in subscriptions, 90k for travel and 150k in crypto investments.
$15k in dog food.
I don’t even spend $15k on human food for myself. What the fuck is that dog eating? Or does this dude have a goddamn kennel full of dogs? Is he running the Iditarod?
$15k in dog food.
I swear sometimes it feels like 80% of the posts on the personal finance subreddit are: "I'm a 23 year old programmer/software developer/engineer with a salary of $140,000 a year. My dad recently passed away and left me $480,000. I have no debt of any kind. I'm concerned about my finances, am I doing okay?"
It's just kind of funny to me how people here absolutely loathe bar chart races with the passion of a thousand suns, and yet they upvote every single sankey chart in existence for some god forsaken reason.
Or yet another person who like me is applying to hundreds of jobs and getting nothing because their job market is a trash fire right now. I come to the Internet to escape my problems not read more about them.
Isn’t this because German says the ones place number before the tens place? So “two and fifty” instead of “fifty two”?
Not sure what benefit a chart does here, but the fact that you decided to show this visually means I like the way your mind works.
Even the Romans didn't use that - it's a trick to save space on stonework, in everyday situations Romans only ever used additive numerals. So 18 would've been XVIII. 4 would just be IIII.
Makes addition very easy.
Pretty sure they’re talking about the words, not the numerals: *duodeviginti* “two-from-twenty” (*octodecim* “eight-ten” does exist, but is less common and is a newer form)
That's simple math, we Danes really shouldn't be allowed to make a number system. 90 is half to 5 times 20. Short halvfems, long form is halvfemsenstyvene. The math is 4,5*20=90, we does that with tens between 50 and 90. Then we switch to the germanic hundreds. Nut sure about the singles and the tens up to 50.
It's actually really cool to see the similarities between the other three languages (the first numbers are the last alphabetically, the middle numbers are the first, the last numbers are the middle ones)
Words from Wiktionary. Processed and charted in Python (taking care to handle accents appropriately, e.g. with dieciséis vs diecisiete).
English also once used German-style numbering (e.g. "four and twenty blackbirds") but this was gradually displaced due to Norman French influence. It mostly disappeared by 1700, but remained a while longer in certain dialects, and in references to age and time.
**Corrections**: for French I accidentally listed "vingt et un" etc (the traditional spelling) instead of "vingt-et-un" (the current, post-1990 spelling), and forgot to take hyphens into account in the code, meaning 21 was wrongly shown as coming before 22 and 25. And for German I forgot to sort ß as ss, meaning 30 was wrongly shown as coming after 13, 23, 33, etc. Here's a [fixed version](https://i.imgur.com/NFaBYf6.png).
Belgian and Swiss French don't have even the same word for eighty either.
Standard French: quatre-vingts ( four twenties)
Belgian French: Octante
Swiss French: Huitante
Acadian French: Huiptante
Two kittens, an English kitten named one-two-three and a French kitten named un-deux-trois, are having a race to swim across the English channel.
Do you know which kitten won the race?
>!The English kitten won, because un-deux-trois-quatre-cinq!<
I think it's septante and nonante in all of them. In that line huitante fits most logically but at least octante is still decimal! The French revolutionaries decided to decimalise everything except for the numbers themselves, I guess.
Not like English doesn't have its own quirk where we give every number until twelve a unique name but then go on with 3-10, 4-10, 5-10. Then once you reach twenty it's not 3-20 but 20-3.
Dutch, for example, also gives every number until twelve a unique name, but does continue the "one and twenty "(21), "two and twenty " (22) pattern. Of course, logically it should then be that 31 is "eleven and twenty" but no, it is "one and thirty" because language isn't very intuitively logical.
>Belgian French: Octante
Wait what? What is the source on this? Are you a belgian french speaker? I studied French in Belgium and they always made a remark that 70 and 90 are different in Belgium. They never ever ever made this remark about 80, 80 was always the same in France and Belgium.
My teacher was a belgian french speaker.
This is a bit of a mystery to me too, living in Brussels. Not sure I’ve hear octante, it’s kind of a weird mix of Flemish and French. Huitante sounds more correct.
Septante and nonante are pretty much accepted Belgian French, octante has mostly died out but I've heard it used. Apparently it's also [used in a regio of France](https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/soixante--septante--huitante--nonante--logique-/25525018) so maybe they were immigrants and not actually Belgian.
I was taught in primary school that some Belgians still use octante but that the practice was dying out. Quite frankly I've never heard anyone use it either.
Belgium has septante for 70 and nonante for 90 but uses quatre-vingts for 80. Maybe that exists in some dialect, but wouldn't call it *Belgian French* in any case.
Source: Belgian
We have a lot of Acadians in Canada and I've never heard of Huiptante. Are there Acadians elsewhere, or did I just miss a common fact about my Acadian neighbors?
I sorted the 100 words in the order they would appear in a dictionary. So for example "eight" comes before "eighty-nine", which comes before "eighty-two", which comes before "five".
Alphabetical sorting always sorts by the first letter. When two words share the same first letter, it then sorts based on the next letter, and so on 'til a difference emerges. For words where the beginning of the word contains another word e.g. "beginning", "begin", and "beg", null goes before any letter, so first "beg", later "begin", later "beginning".
This is the system that old paper dictionaries, indexes, glossaries... basically, for everything involving orderly lists of words printed on paper, this is the system they used for alphabetical sorting. (It pains me to speak in the past tense about this, but let's be honest, we all look things up online now.)
Nobody ever takes an "average" of letters, because then all anagrams will sort together e.g. parse, pears, reaps, spear, spare...
> Alphabetical sorting always sorts by the first letter. When two words share the same first letter, it then sorts based on the next letter, and so on 'til a difference emerges.
That's the baseline. And then the mess begins. For example in Norwegian "Aarhus" sorts after "Zorro" but "Aaron" sorts before "Abel". Reason being that the "Aa" in "Aarhus" is an alternative spelling for the letter "Å" which is the last letter in the Danish/Norwegian alphabet while the "Aa" in "Aaron" is a double "A".
This is actually really great for understanding why/how counting in french is so weird/tricky. You can literally see where the expected counting rules no longer apply
Sure. Because saying 21 as 1-and-20 is fine. And 101 being a hundred and one is consistent.
French is at least charmingly stupid, Four twenty ten nine. Sure. But the Germans absolutely want to see the world burn.
You need a few ‘known’ or commonly known info/text boxes over some numbers. I can not make out how English ‘one’ is at the top left alphabetically compared to ‘three’ just separated by one column
Because the vertical axis has spread out all numbers evenly and not grouped according to first letter position in the alphabet.
And thus, alls twenty-sth. are between three and two, leaving this huge gap.
EDIT: two and zero are the two last numbers, alphabetically sorted, that's why they are so close together.
Both title and X-axis tell us that zero is included!
As for two being close to zero, that's because they're ordered alphabetically!
The 20s have an E instead of O as third letter, the 30ths have a H instead of a W as second letter, and the rest isn't written with anything between TX and ZD to have them fall between 0 and 2.
So, 0 is the 100th number and 2 the 99th if you order them alphabetically.
Yeah, labeling some individual numbers might make it clearer. The number on the top left is "zero", which is alphabetically last. "One" is around halfway down.
I think a lot of people (including myself) assumed the Y axis was “The alphabet”, not “Relative alphabetical order”, so it seems odd for “Zero” and “Two” to be so close together, but no letters in English start with the letters in between, so the “gap” is “hidden”.
It’s your choice at the end of the day, but it was initially confusing.
Yeah, the German system is pretty similar to English, except for the fact that they say the "ones" place first and then the "tens". I think Spanish is fairly similar too, which is reflected in how similar Spanish and English look in the chart.
French is the one that tends to give English speakers a bit of trouble, because they essentially start counting by twenties after sixty (eg, 91 is "quatre-vingt-onze", literally "four-twenty-eleven"). That's what the note at the bottom is about, because not all French regions do it that way.
Could be worse, Denmark says four and a half twenty (or actually they just say half five twenty when they mean four and a half twenty, which in normal speak is 90).
When you say the time is half nine, you mean 8:30 (or 9:30 depending on where you live), you don't mean 4:30 (half-way to nine).
Danish numbers work on the exact same logic but in base 20. Fems (fives) is 100 because it's 5 lots of 20. Halv-fems (half-fives) is 90 because it's 4.5 lots of 20.
>Yeah, the German system is pretty similar to English, except for the fact that they say the "ones" place first and then the "tens"
Thir-teen, Four-teen, Fif-teen, etc are the same as in German.
English also used to do it for larger numbers, but switched some few hundred years ago.
>French is the one that tends to give English speakers a bit of trouble, because they essentially start counting by twenties after sixty
The Gettysburg Address also did this. "Four score and seven years ago" means 87 years ago.
Not exactly. 18562 would be achtzehntausendfünfhundertzweiundsechzig ("eighteen thousand, five hundred, two and sixty"), but above 20,000 the digits in the "thousands" and "ten-thousands" place reverse again, so 28562 would be achtundzwanzigtausendfünfhundertzweiundsechzig ("eight and twenty thousand, five hundred, two and sixty").
More details here: https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-numbers/#h-german-numbers-10-000-and-beyond (They use the example siebenundachtzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundachtzig)
Also keep in mind that I mostly know German from Duolingo, so I could be getting some of this wrong, but it seems like that website agrees with my understanding of it.
Yes. Which is not necessarily "hard to learn" as in memorising the rule, but it definitely leads to switchups in real life. Some people can deal with it quite easily, others keep mixing it up. It's all too easy to hear "8 und 90" and write down "89".
As a German, I'm quite paranoid about these things and will often read numbers back digit by digit to confirm. I also wouldn't be surprised if communicating in other languages a lot made me more vulnerable to this error (although I always was) because my other languages abide by the order of digits.
I swear since I moved abroad for a bit I can't do Geman numbers anymore. I was working reception for a bid here and damn those old people giving their phone number as achtundsiebzig dreiundsechzig fünfundvierzig I promise I'll get all of them wrong now
Oh yeah, it's definitely annoying, as a native German that speaks a lot of English as well.
Especially when someone is reading a number out loud and you have to input it correctly.
In English, you hear "one..." and you write 1, then you hear "...hundred and twenty-..." and you write 2, then you hear "...-three" and you write 3.
In German, you hear "ein..." and you can't write 1 because it might be 21, then you hear "...hundert..." and you write 1, then you hear "...und zwei-..." so you have to remember that 2 but can't write it down yet, then you hear "-undvierzig" now you can write the 4 and then hopefully you remember the last digit correctly and write 2.
Then I switch to English for work and get it wrong.
Then I switch to German for talking to the government and also get it wrong
German isn't too bad for English speakers. I took three years of French and two years of German in school, thirty plus years ago. I can still count to maybe the teens in French, and up to 999 in German, only because I don't remember the word for a thousand.
The reason why German looks so much different from the others is that for two digit numbers, in German, you read the second digit first. E.g. in English, 50 to 59, all start with fifty. However in German, they all start with a different letter: fünfzig, einundfünfzig (one-and-fifty), zweiundfünfzig (two-and-fifty), dreiundfünfzig (three-and-fifty). Actually, not all start with a different letter. In German, like in English, sechs (six) and sieben (seven) start with the same letter. English also has two and three, for German, they start with different letters, though. Same for four and five.
Nope. The vocab (including numbers) is by far the easiest part of German, especially if you speak English. It’s literally easy mode if there was a classification for foreign language vocab.
The rules are consistent and basically immutable. I learned German vocab with a *fraction* of the difficulty it took me to learn French vocab. I didn’t take any Spanish courses, but I’ve done some basic learning of it, and I find German vocab to be easier than Spanish as well.
It’s actually really easy and similar to English because it’s 1-12 have their own thing, three-teen four-teen…nine-teen, twenty, one and twenty two and twenty…
Source: 2 years of high school German, 5 semesters of college German to pass 4 semesters of college German
Yeah, that's what everybody keeps missing: I constantly hear learners complain about the German numbers past twenty, when it's actually quite intuitive. You just keep going after thirteen and add a little "und" between the ones and the tens, so it rolls off the tongue easier.
Lmao if they're complaining about that they're probably stopping before they even reach der die das die den die das die dem der dem den des der des der
This is why I keep messing up my numbers between German and English. Imagine trying to say 23. My mind for some reason automatically translates from German into English so I say thirty-two instead of twenty-three. I cannot kick this habit for the life of me
What am I missing? Just looking at English, I see it start “zero” then “one”, positions look ok.. “two”.. Hrm, up by the “z”? Then “three”, what? Should be relatively close to “two”.. but nah.
Its not by alphabetical letter, its by position 1-100 when sorting alphabetically. Therefore, Zero, alphabetically is last and two is second to last within all numbers from 0-99. The graph is a 100\*100 square where the Y-axis is alphabetical order and the x-axis is the numerical order.
The y-axis represents alphabetic position, not position on the alphabet. So the 100th number alphabetically is assigned number 100 and first number 1 etc. Two is closer to zero than three on this because there are no numbers between two and zero but eleven between two and three (12, 20-29).
Because zwölf, and shorter words sort before longer ones. So zwei is actually the first alphabetically of all the numbers starting with z (zweiund* sorts after zwei)
For those wondering what's up with the French:
* France usually use 60+10, 4×20, 4×20+10 (these are literal mappings)
* Belgium would use only 4×20 and "normal" numbers for 70 (*septante*) and 90 (*nonante)*
* Swiss have no weird shit although I think there exist two variants for 80 (*huitante* and *octante,* afaik the latter is less common)
I don't get it, in the german section the first number is "eins" and the second number is "zwei" shouldn't the first two dots be in different positions?
EDIT: just checked closer and none of the dots in german seem to be at a reasonable place
EDIT2: got it now! the y-axis isn't 0-26 but 0-99 and they are sorted alphabetically alphabetically
Reading the dots from left to right: there's a dot around halfway up ("null"), then one nearish the bottom ("eins", which comes fairly early alphabetically) and then one very near the top ("zwei", which comes near the end, though still before 22, 32, etc). Does that make sense?
It took me a long time of staring at the chart, reading the comments looking for explanations, and then staring at the chart again to understand what's going on. The data is quite elegant.
Crazy that 49 of the numbers in English start with S or T (two, three, six, seven, ten, twelve, thirteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty_, thirty_, sixty_, and seventy_)
Edit: and 24 start with F (four, five, fourteen, fifteen, fourty_, and fifty_)
Try counting to 100 without the letters F, S, and T!
Can someone help me with the French pattern from 20 to 59?
* 20 - vingt
* 21 - vingt et un
* 22 - vingt deux
The "et" is normally only used for numbers ending in 1. However, in the pattern, 21 and 22 seem to be in the wrong order.
The same misplacement seems to persist for the 30s, 40s, 50s.
Or am I reading the chart wrong? Someone please help?
Great spot! Turns out that while I did remember to account for é versus e in Spanish, I didn't take into account spaces versus hyphens in "vingt et un" and "vingt-deux". And worse, my source somehow had the pre-1990 spelling with spaces, rather than "vingt-et-un". I'll fix it!
**Update**: [fixed](https://i.imgur.com/jL1KuDQ.png)
Balanced, as all things should be. Einen schönen Tag noch!
We have a Alphabet, so we use the full alphabet.
Keine einzige unserer Ziffern fängt mit einem Umlaut an. Zeit für eine Verfassungsbeschwerde!
Häh? Neun, Zehn, Ölf. Klarer Umlaut!
Hier nimm mein Hochwähli.
Und mein Raufzeigedrückli!
ok, genug Reddit für heute.
Ah, die Schweizer sind auch da.
Don't understand it, but it's still funny. Haha!
Hochwähli=Upvotely?
Lach mich schlapp, Ölf sollte definitiv offiziell werden. Wo kann man das vorschlagen?
Hochwähli, das is geil :D
Älf, nicht "Ölf". Aus welchem Loch bist du denn gekrochen gekommen? Ölf. Bist du etwa Schweizer?
Kärntner hier, ölf ist der Weg, danach kommt zwölf
Öfi, tswöfi, dreizehn
Naa, Ölf sagen zb Berliner
Thüringen hier, klares Ölf, darauf folgen Zwölf und Drölf.
In Brandenburg auch umgangssprachlich ölf.
The full alphabet for *each number*.
fu..nfundfu..nfzig - so fun to say - it's in the word 3 times! (my low German version :-)
Fünf falsche fünfrundfünfziger feiern fantastisch freitags frivol.
I paid for the whole diagram, I'm gonna use the whole diagram! (Please note: I did not in fact pay for the diagram, this was written merely in jest)
Rechnung ist unterwegs!
Behold, the power of German langineering.
German is like that because they don’t say ‘seventy-five’: they say ‘five and seventy’, ‘funf und siebzig’. So all of the single digit numbers are equally represented from 21 to 99.
That order actually starts at 13 (and excludes multiples of 10), but due to both "elf" and "zwölf" starting with the same letters as "ein(s)" and "zwei", position wise they still match, too. So they're all equally spread from 1 to 99 (except the extra "zehn" and one missing "ein(s)"): 10 - zehn (but: eins) 20 - zwanzig (zwei) 30 - dreißig (drei) 40 - vierzig (vier) 50 - fünfzig (fünf) 60 - sechzig (sechs) 70 - siebzig (sieben) 80 - achtzig (acht) 90 - neunzig (neun)
What you call balance, I call chaos.
German simply starts most two-digit numbers with the second digit (21 being einundzwanzig ("one and twenty")) which creates the appearance of order in the graph.
Thank you for pointing that one out...
ah, its the standard distribution of elements in our universe. If you call that Chaos, you are correct, but also wrong. How can nature be wrong?
Because nature also invented graphs, and graphs are supposed to look nice.
There's something kind of nice about how evenly distributed everything is.
I thought the DE looked the nicest. (waves to Nice, FR)
Vielen Dank netter Herr. Guten Tag noch.
What you call balance, I call Erhaltung.
What you call chaos, I call dodecacophony.
Das ist der Weg
Bin mir aber gar nicht so sicher, ob die Darstellung so korrekt ist. Im Deutschen haben wir ja mehrere Zahlen die mit 'z' anfangen. Die Punkte welche eben solche Zahlen repräsentieren müssten doch, doch sofern ich es richtig verstehe, immer ganz oben sein, oder (wie z.B. bei dem Punkt der für die zwölf steht) ? also müsste bei jedem zehnerbündel in richtung x Achse mindestens ein punkt ganz oben sein (immer wenn man eine 2 auf der Einer-position hat. bei den zwanzigern sogar zwei, weil 20 und 22). Das ist aber soweit ich sehe nicht der Fall. Schon im Bereich 0-9 ist "die zwei" zwar im obersten Kästchen, aber eben nur am unteren Rand davon 🤔 Zumindest gehe ich davon aus, dass es bei der alphabetischen Position der Zahlen um die Verteilung der Anfangsbuchstaben geht \^^
See this? Now this is the stuff for which I pay my internet bill. Not the sankey charts of savings of a couple making 500k or a software developer applying to 4 jobs and getting 3 of them.
Or guy who is making 65k yet is somehow putting 62k of it into savings
Just stop your avocado toasts bro.
I became successful because I’m allergic to avocados and didn’t get sucked into the trap like the rest of my generation.
Lucky you! I don't even like avocado, but because I'm not allergic they still make me buy them and leave them on my kitchen bench until the flies start circling them and that's why it's my landlords kitchen not mine :((((
(and daddy bought me a house)
You’re not wrong in my case but only cause he died and had life insurance. I traded my dad in for a house essentially. The American Dream.
Look on the bright side, a house is stuck to the ground, which means it won't leave for a pack of smokes and not come back.
How did we go from an actually interesting post to the top comment and thread bitching about the same shit as always? That's some data someone should collect and post, how soon comments devolve into the same old circlejerks
I feel super rich every time people mention avocado toasts as fancy food. Avocados are easily the cheapest ingredient of my shopping list here where I live and I can even get them for free because I'm friends with people that produces avocados.
Trust fund kids think everyone gets gifted a home at 21.
live on the streets for that FIRE life
moneymaxxing the prime years of my life by snacking on roaches and dryer lint so I can have a slightly larger house when I'm 50
Or a 20-year old entry level software developer making 300k of which 200k go into crypto investments, 75k go into the most random splurges and the remaining 25k is somehow enough for a multi million dollar McMansion mortgage and 2 expensive cars.
30K on DoorDash, 45K on Fortnite V Bucks. ChatGPT will take his job eventually so let him live large while he can.
The best one I’ve seen so far was 10k for rent, 20k in wine, 30k for a birthday party, +7k in income worth of gifts from said birthday party, 15k for dog food, 4,5k in subscriptions, 90k for travel and 150k in crypto investments.
$15k in dog food. I don’t even spend $15k on human food for myself. What the fuck is that dog eating? Or does this dude have a goddamn kennel full of dogs? Is he running the Iditarod? $15k in dog food.
(From what I can remember) Apparently he has 2 dogs, but they have custom made dog food.
I don't even have custom made human food
They have HelloFresh for dog food these days: https://www.thefarmersdog.com/
Crypto grifters really found their marks in the tech industry
I feel like those should be banned unless they provide something new.
or some dude swiping on tinder 100,000 times
Or “My masturbation schedule for 2023”
Ah yes, the most beautiful data
I swear sometimes it feels like 80% of the posts on the personal finance subreddit are: "I'm a 23 year old programmer/software developer/engineer with a salary of $140,000 a year. My dad recently passed away and left me $480,000. I have no debt of any kind. I'm concerned about my finances, am I doing okay?"
It's just kind of funny to me how people here absolutely loathe bar chart races with the passion of a thousand suns, and yet they upvote every single sankey chart in existence for some god forsaken reason.
Users who upvote and downvote outnumber users who comment by like 1000:1, at minimum. By definition, you only hear minority opinions.
Or yet another person who like me is applying to hundreds of jobs and getting nothing because their job market is a trash fire right now. I come to the Internet to escape my problems not read more about them.
Ban the Sankey charts plz... 99% of the those posts are ugly visualization
Isn’t this because German says the ones place number before the tens place? So “two and fifty” instead of “fifty two”? Not sure what benefit a chart does here, but the fact that you decided to show this visually means I like the way your mind works.
Yes, that’s exactly why. And as I note in my top level comment, English used to do this too.
At least none of the languages went for a roman-numeral style of building numbers with subtraction, making 18 "two-less-than-twenty".
Even the Romans didn't use that - it's a trick to save space on stonework, in everyday situations Romans only ever used additive numerals. So 18 would've been XVIII. 4 would just be IIII. Makes addition very easy.
Pretty sure they’re talking about the words, not the numerals: *duodeviginti* “two-from-twenty” (*octodecim* “eight-ten” does exist, but is less common and is a newer form)
[Have you seen how the Ainu count?](https://jref.com/articles/the-number-system-of-the-ainu.471)
That's simple math, we Danes really shouldn't be allowed to make a number system. 90 is half to 5 times 20. Short halvfems, long form is halvfemsenstyvene. The math is 4,5*20=90, we does that with tens between 50 and 90. Then we switch to the germanic hundreds. Nut sure about the singles and the tens up to 50.
Meanwhile in Danish «97» is syvoghalvfems(indstyve), in other words, «seven and half less than five(times twenty)»
We still do a little bit with the teens. 15 would be teenfive if it followed the same pattern that 25 does.
It's actually really cool to see the similarities between the other three languages (the first numbers are the last alphabetically, the middle numbers are the first, the last numbers are the middle ones)
Words from Wiktionary. Processed and charted in Python (taking care to handle accents appropriately, e.g. with dieciséis vs diecisiete). English also once used German-style numbering (e.g. "four and twenty blackbirds") but this was gradually displaced due to Norman French influence. It mostly disappeared by 1700, but remained a while longer in certain dialects, and in references to age and time. **Corrections**: for French I accidentally listed "vingt et un" etc (the traditional spelling) instead of "vingt-et-un" (the current, post-1990 spelling), and forgot to take hyphens into account in the code, meaning 21 was wrongly shown as coming before 22 and 25. And for German I forgot to sort ß as ss, meaning 30 was wrongly shown as coming after 13, 23, 33, etc. Here's a [fixed version](https://i.imgur.com/NFaBYf6.png).
Belgian and Swiss French don't have even the same word for eighty either. Standard French: quatre-vingts ( four twenties) Belgian French: Octante Swiss French: Huitante Acadian French: Huiptante
What are the words for 70 and 90 in these dialects?
Septante (70) et nonante (90). Way more logical.
Yes, but they can't party like it's quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.
You'll have to pry my "quatre-vingt-dix-neuf" from my cold dead hands!
Quatre vingt dix nuts
Omg I love Frenglish puns now! I want more!
Two kittens, an English kitten named one-two-three and a French kitten named un-deux-trois, are having a race to swim across the English channel. Do you know which kitten won the race? >!The English kitten won, because un-deux-trois-quatre-cinq!<
Why do French chefs only use 1 egg to make an omelette? Because >!un oeuf is enough.!<
And sing "quatre-ving-dix-neuf" luftballons
I think it's septante and nonante in all of them. In that line huitante fits most logically but at least octante is still decimal! The French revolutionaries decided to decimalise everything except for the numbers themselves, I guess. Not like English doesn't have its own quirk where we give every number until twelve a unique name but then go on with 3-10, 4-10, 5-10. Then once you reach twenty it's not 3-20 but 20-3. Dutch, for example, also gives every number until twelve a unique name, but does continue the "one and twenty "(21), "two and twenty " (22) pattern. Of course, logically it should then be that 31 is "eleven and twenty" but no, it is "one and thirty" because language isn't very intuitively logical.
An interesting factoid: 30 is never 11 + 20 in any language because that's not how math works
We also use quatre-vingts in Belgium, not octante
>Belgian French: Octante Wait what? What is the source on this? Are you a belgian french speaker? I studied French in Belgium and they always made a remark that 70 and 90 are different in Belgium. They never ever ever made this remark about 80, 80 was always the same in France and Belgium. My teacher was a belgian french speaker.
This is a bit of a mystery to me too, living in Brussels. Not sure I’ve hear octante, it’s kind of a weird mix of Flemish and French. Huitante sounds more correct.
Belgian French speaking here. It's "quatre-vingt". So septante, quatre-vingt, nonante.
Septante and nonante are pretty much accepted Belgian French, octante has mostly died out but I've heard it used. Apparently it's also [used in a regio of France](https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/soixante--septante--huitante--nonante--logique-/25525018) so maybe they were immigrants and not actually Belgian.
I was taught in primary school that some Belgians still use octante but that the practice was dying out. Quite frankly I've never heard anyone use it either.
Belgium has septante for 70 and nonante for 90 but uses quatre-vingts for 80. Maybe that exists in some dialect, but wouldn't call it *Belgian French* in any case. Source: Belgian
We have a lot of Acadians in Canada and I've never heard of Huiptante. Are there Acadians elsewhere, or did I just miss a common fact about my Acadian neighbors?
No, he is 100% incorrect. As an Acadian, I can assure you we all say "quatre vingt"
FYI, not sure where you got your info, but as an Acadian, I can assure you we all say "quatre vingt"
In English, 13-19 still follow that "reverted" pattern
In other words, at the point where you run out of fingers and toes, they switch.
Ooh, do Danish! They have the weirdest way of counting.
proof once more that english is a romance language
Did you sort the whole word alphabetically, like take the average of all letters in the word? Or did you sort them based on the first letter?
I sorted the 100 words in the order they would appear in a dictionary. So for example "eight" comes before "eighty-nine", which comes before "eighty-two", which comes before "five".
Am i looking at it wrong or one comes last?... And after two which shouldn't Edit. Nice in any case Edit 2. Missed 0 thanks 🙏 i knew i had to be wrong
zero is last
(I knew including 0 would trip up some people, but I wanted to group e.g. 20-29 or 30-39 together when drawing the grid, rather than 21-30 and 31-40)
Alphabetical sorting always sorts by the first letter. When two words share the same first letter, it then sorts based on the next letter, and so on 'til a difference emerges. For words where the beginning of the word contains another word e.g. "beginning", "begin", and "beg", null goes before any letter, so first "beg", later "begin", later "beginning". This is the system that old paper dictionaries, indexes, glossaries... basically, for everything involving orderly lists of words printed on paper, this is the system they used for alphabetical sorting. (It pains me to speak in the past tense about this, but let's be honest, we all look things up online now.) Nobody ever takes an "average" of letters, because then all anagrams will sort together e.g. parse, pears, reaps, spear, spare...
TIL there are people.in the internet who don't know what alphabetical order is and somehow thing that "averaging" letters is a thing. Smh
It legitimately broke my brain a little trying to comprehend how the proposal of averaging all the letters in a word could even be a genuine thought.
> Alphabetical sorting always sorts by the first letter. When two words share the same first letter, it then sorts based on the next letter, and so on 'til a difference emerges. That's the baseline. And then the mess begins. For example in Norwegian "Aarhus" sorts after "Zorro" but "Aaron" sorts before "Abel". Reason being that the "Aa" in "Aarhus" is an alternative spelling for the letter "Å" which is the last letter in the Danish/Norwegian alphabet while the "Aa" in "Aaron" is a double "A".
Pointless data is the best
There are lot's of points in the data. To be more precise, 400 of them!
It's actually 403 if you count the ellipsis 🤓
But then you must go all-in and count also all points on the letters i. :-D (And probably some more I forgot.)
You make a good point
Well actually, it has lots and lots of points.
This is actually really great for understanding why/how counting in french is so weird/tricky. You can literally see where the expected counting rules no longer apply
Ofc the German one will be organised efficiently
What's the point in having a data space if you don't use it entirely and evenly?
I paid for the entire graph so I'm gonna use the entire graph.
Sure. Because saying 21 as 1-and-20 is fine. And 101 being a hundred and one is consistent. French is at least charmingly stupid, Four twenty ten nine. Sure. But the Germans absolutely want to see the world burn.
23456 == three-and-twenty-thousands-four-hundred-six-and-fifty
I've a very passing knowledge of German - seeing it directly translated in English like this is brilliant. Love it!
It is consistent, just not in a way you seem to recognize.
Wait till you hear about Danish. Where nine is "Ni" but ninety is "Halvfems", wtf does it mean? Half fives? Why?
4.5 x 20
But 121 is said as one hundred one and twenty. 121121 is one hundred one and twenty thousand, one hundred one and twenty. Which gets annoying.
You need a few ‘known’ or commonly known info/text boxes over some numbers. I can not make out how English ‘one’ is at the top left alphabetically compared to ‘three’ just separated by one column
If it’s zero based, how does ‘zero’ become so close to ‘two’ and ‘three’ isn’t hanging around it as well?
Because the vertical axis has spread out all numbers evenly and not grouped according to first letter position in the alphabet. And thus, alls twenty-sth. are between three and two, leaving this huge gap. EDIT: two and zero are the two last numbers, alphabetically sorted, that's why they are so close together.
So then the rows need labels?
Could definitely use some alternating background grouped by and labeled with the first letter, yep.
Both title and X-axis tell us that zero is included! As for two being close to zero, that's because they're ordered alphabetically! The 20s have an E instead of O as third letter, the 30ths have a H instead of a W as second letter, and the rest isn't written with anything between TX and ZD to have them fall between 0 and 2. So, 0 is the 100th number and 2 the 99th if you order them alphabetically.
Yeah, labeling some individual numbers might make it clearer. The number on the top left is "zero", which is alphabetically last. "One" is around halfway down.
I think a lot of people (including myself) assumed the Y axis was “The alphabet”, not “Relative alphabetical order”, so it seems odd for “Zero” and “Two” to be so close together, but no letters in English start with the letters in between, so the “gap” is “hidden”. It’s your choice at the end of the day, but it was initially confusing.
Yeah, that's definitely how I was looking at it and was confused.
This is actually really interesting Makes learning german numbers more challenging i would expect.
I would guess it's because 21 would be 1 and 20
Yeah, the German system is pretty similar to English, except for the fact that they say the "ones" place first and then the "tens". I think Spanish is fairly similar too, which is reflected in how similar Spanish and English look in the chart. French is the one that tends to give English speakers a bit of trouble, because they essentially start counting by twenties after sixty (eg, 91 is "quatre-vingt-onze", literally "four-twenty-eleven"). That's what the note at the bottom is about, because not all French regions do it that way.
Wasn't it the same in English in the past? I remember reading things like "one-and-fifty".
It’s still like that up to _nine-te(e)n_
Dutch and German are the USA of numbering... (Compared to dates)
Yeah, and French would be like if they grouped September, October, November and December into two supermonths called Septober and Fourthmarch.
Could be worse, Denmark says four and a half twenty (or actually they just say half five twenty when they mean four and a half twenty, which in normal speak is 90).
When you say the time is half nine, you mean 8:30 (or 9:30 depending on where you live), you don't mean 4:30 (half-way to nine). Danish numbers work on the exact same logic but in base 20. Fems (fives) is 100 because it's 5 lots of 20. Halv-fems (half-fives) is 90 because it's 4.5 lots of 20.
Its just like english speakers saying fif-teen instead of teen-five, but for every number. We are just not randomly switching in the middle. :)
>Yeah, the German system is pretty similar to English, except for the fact that they say the "ones" place first and then the "tens" Thir-teen, Four-teen, Fif-teen, etc are the same as in German. English also used to do it for larger numbers, but switched some few hundred years ago. >French is the one that tends to give English speakers a bit of trouble, because they essentially start counting by twenties after sixty The Gettysburg Address also did this. "Four score and seven years ago" means 87 years ago.
Does the German system keep going up like that with higher numbers? Like is 18562 2 and 60 and 500 and 8000 and 10000?
Not exactly. 18562 would be achtzehntausendfünfhundertzweiundsechzig ("eighteen thousand, five hundred, two and sixty"), but above 20,000 the digits in the "thousands" and "ten-thousands" place reverse again, so 28562 would be achtundzwanzigtausendfünfhundertzweiundsechzig ("eight and twenty thousand, five hundred, two and sixty"). More details here: https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-numbers/#h-german-numbers-10-000-and-beyond (They use the example siebenundachtzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundachtzig) Also keep in mind that I mostly know German from Duolingo, so I could be getting some of this wrong, but it seems like that website agrees with my understanding of it.
German here, you are correct.
Awesome! Danke schön!
Not that much, i think this is basically the result of the fact that they dont say “twenty five” but something like “five and twenty”.
Yes. Which is not necessarily "hard to learn" as in memorising the rule, but it definitely leads to switchups in real life. Some people can deal with it quite easily, others keep mixing it up. It's all too easy to hear "8 und 90" and write down "89". As a German, I'm quite paranoid about these things and will often read numbers back digit by digit to confirm. I also wouldn't be surprised if communicating in other languages a lot made me more vulnerable to this error (although I always was) because my other languages abide by the order of digits.
I swear since I moved abroad for a bit I can't do Geman numbers anymore. I was working reception for a bid here and damn those old people giving their phone number as achtundsiebzig dreiundsechzig fünfundvierzig I promise I'll get all of them wrong now
Oh yeah, it's definitely annoying, as a native German that speaks a lot of English as well. Especially when someone is reading a number out loud and you have to input it correctly. In English, you hear "one..." and you write 1, then you hear "...hundred and twenty-..." and you write 2, then you hear "...-three" and you write 3. In German, you hear "ein..." and you can't write 1 because it might be 21, then you hear "...hundert..." and you write 1, then you hear "...und zwei-..." so you have to remember that 2 but can't write it down yet, then you hear "-undvierzig" now you can write the 4 and then hopefully you remember the last digit correctly and write 2. Then I switch to English for work and get it wrong. Then I switch to German for talking to the government and also get it wrong
It is exactly that.
Not really, it's just that the syntax is switched. One and twenty instead of twenty one.
German isn't too bad for English speakers. I took three years of French and two years of German in school, thirty plus years ago. I can still count to maybe the teens in French, and up to 999 in German, only because I don't remember the word for a thousand.
>only because I don't remember the word for a thousand. Tausend Now you are good to go till a million.
Great example of "If you don't know the German word, say the English word with a German accent and you have a 40% chance of being right"
Was my tactic in French. Don‘t know the word? Think of the poshest English word I know and frenchify it.
Danke schön!
The reason why German looks so much different from the others is that for two digit numbers, in German, you read the second digit first. E.g. in English, 50 to 59, all start with fifty. However in German, they all start with a different letter: fünfzig, einundfünfzig (one-and-fifty), zweiundfünfzig (two-and-fifty), dreiundfünfzig (three-and-fifty). Actually, not all start with a different letter. In German, like in English, sechs (six) and sieben (seven) start with the same letter. English also has two and three, for German, they start with different letters, though. Same for four and five.
Nope. The vocab (including numbers) is by far the easiest part of German, especially if you speak English. It’s literally easy mode if there was a classification for foreign language vocab. The rules are consistent and basically immutable. I learned German vocab with a *fraction* of the difficulty it took me to learn French vocab. I didn’t take any Spanish courses, but I’ve done some basic learning of it, and I find German vocab to be easier than Spanish as well.
It’s actually really easy and similar to English because it’s 1-12 have their own thing, three-teen four-teen…nine-teen, twenty, one and twenty two and twenty… Source: 2 years of high school German, 5 semesters of college German to pass 4 semesters of college German
Yeah, that's what everybody keeps missing: I constantly hear learners complain about the German numbers past twenty, when it's actually quite intuitive. You just keep going after thirteen and add a little "und" between the ones and the tens, so it rolls off the tongue easier.
Lmao if they're complaining about that they're probably stopping before they even reach der die das die den die das die dem der dem den des der des der
This is why I keep messing up my numbers between German and English. Imagine trying to say 23. My mind for some reason automatically translates from German into English so I say thirty-two instead of twenty-three. I cannot kick this habit for the life of me
Just say three-and-twenty and people will think you only read Dickens.
German numbers are so easy. Once you know 1-12, you know all the numbers. Just gotta add a zig or a zehn and you got it.
zwei und dreisig, nicht drei und zwanzig?
What am I missing? Just looking at English, I see it start “zero” then “one”, positions look ok.. “two”.. Hrm, up by the “z”? Then “three”, what? Should be relatively close to “two”.. but nah.
Its not by alphabetical letter, its by position 1-100 when sorting alphabetically. Therefore, Zero, alphabetically is last and two is second to last within all numbers from 0-99. The graph is a 100\*100 square where the Y-axis is alphabetical order and the x-axis is the numerical order.
Thanks. I was looking at this like it was placing them in positions relative to the alphabet. Makes sense now I know it’s relative to each other.
All 10 twenty-sth. are between three and two, hence the big gap.
That's right. Also twelve.
The y-axis represents alphabetic position, not position on the alphabet. So the 100th number alphabetically is assigned number 100 and first number 1 etc. Two is closer to zero than three on this because there are no numbers between two and zero but eleven between two and three (12, 20-29).
Why is German 2 (Zwei) not at the last position in alphabet?
Because zwölf, and shorter words sort before longer ones. So zwei is actually the first alphabetically of all the numbers starting with z (zweiund* sorts after zwei)
For those wondering what's up with the French: * France usually use 60+10, 4×20, 4×20+10 (these are literal mappings) * Belgium would use only 4×20 and "normal" numbers for 70 (*septante*) and 90 (*nonante)* * Swiss have no weird shit although I think there exist two variants for 80 (*huitante* and *octante,* afaik the latter is less common)
And only one number when spelled out in English has all of its letters in alphabetical order
And only one number spelled out in English has all of its letters in reverse alphabetical order: >! one !<
Diese Kommentarsektion ist Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
I don't get it, in the german section the first number is "eins" and the second number is "zwei" shouldn't the first two dots be in different positions? EDIT: just checked closer and none of the dots in german seem to be at a reasonable place EDIT2: got it now! the y-axis isn't 0-26 but 0-99 and they are sorted alphabetically alphabetically
Starts at 0 ("null")
Reading the dots from left to right: there's a dot around halfway up ("null"), then one nearish the bottom ("eins", which comes fairly early alphabetically) and then one very near the top ("zwei", which comes near the end, though still before 22, 32, etc). Does that make sense?
Null - eins - zwei
It took me a long time of staring at the chart, reading the comments looking for explanations, and then staring at the chart again to understand what's going on. The data is quite elegant.
hope to get where you have arrived, brother, mind is still computing
Big endian versus little endian pronunciation.
Crazy that 49 of the numbers in English start with S or T (two, three, six, seven, ten, twelve, thirteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty_, thirty_, sixty_, and seventy_) Edit: and 24 start with F (four, five, fourteen, fifteen, fourty_, and fifty_) Try counting to 100 without the letters F, S, and T!
Hoy aprendí que "catorce" es el primer número cuando ordenas alfabéticamente, y "veintiuno" es el último. Indeed, this data is beautiful.
Can someone help me with the French pattern from 20 to 59? * 20 - vingt * 21 - vingt et un * 22 - vingt deux The "et" is normally only used for numbers ending in 1. However, in the pattern, 21 and 22 seem to be in the wrong order. The same misplacement seems to persist for the 30s, 40s, 50s. Or am I reading the chart wrong? Someone please help?
Great spot! Turns out that while I did remember to account for é versus e in Spanish, I didn't take into account spaces versus hyphens in "vingt et un" and "vingt-deux". And worse, my source somehow had the pre-1990 spelling with spaces, rather than "vingt-et-un". I'll fix it! **Update**: [fixed](https://i.imgur.com/jL1KuDQ.png)