Counting in the wrong language

64 点作者 respinal超过 5 年前

25 条评论

otikik超过 5 年前

I thank the French for the metric system. But their numbers between 70 and 100 are bonkers.70 is pronunced "60 10". 71 is "60 11". And so on until 80, which is pronounced, obviously, "4 20". 81 is "4 20 1". It goes up to 90, which is "4 20 10". 91 is "4 20 11". The craziness continues until 100, which is, thankfully, a different word ("cent", instead of "4 20 20", or, dear lord, "60 40"). But in 170 it all comes back.I think the French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Canada did the right thing when they replaced all that complexity by dedicated words for 70, 80 and 90.

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ken超过 5 年前

A simpler problem is months. The English system uses arbitrary names, while Japanese/Chinese/Korean just call them "1-month", "2-month", etc.Even though I grew up with it, I find the English system impenetrable. Quick, what's 3 months before November? I have to count it out every time. (In mod 12, -3 is the same as +9, so I just count forward 9 months.)The names of the months are a nice nod to our Roman history but they are a pain in the rear to use. It's high time to relegate them to second-class status, like Roman numerals.

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cyborgx7超过 5 年前

As someone who went to school in spain but at home always spoke german and now lives in Germany, the number inversion is the bain of my existance (hyperbole). I can't tell you how many times I have made mistakes because of it when communicating with people, and how often I have written down number incorrectly because of it.At some point I just want to train myself to say it the "right" way, even if it sounds wrong in german and people will look at me weirdly. But somebody has to start the trend, right?

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agent008t超过 5 年前

I suspect the effect of this, in practice, is almost negligible.What's more interesting is why being good at maths/physics is considered very uncool in English-speaking countries (not sure about other European ones), but is actually seen as cool in, say, Russia or Bulgaria or Singapore [citation needed]. It is not seen as strange or unusual for girls to be better at science than boys either, possibly because it is not uncool [another citation needed].I would say that has a much, much greater impact on outcomes than how numbers are represented in the different languages.

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nkurz超过 5 年前

Depending on what you are counting, sometimes "wrong" can be historically "right":In Swaledale, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, sheep farmers used to, and some still do; count their sheep in a very curious fashion. Instead of One, Two, Three, Four... they go, thus: (1)Yan, (2)Tan, (3)Tether, (4)Mether, (5)Pip; (6)Ezar, (7)Sezar, (8)Acker, (9)Conter, (10)Dick; (11)Yan-a-Dick, (12)Tan-a-Dick, (13)Tether-a-Dick, (14)Mether-a-Dick, (15)Bumfit; (16)Yan-a-Bum, (17)Tan-a-Bum, (18)Tether-a-Bum, (19)Mether-a-Bum, (20)Jigget. Having reached Twenty, they then take a stone [or make a mark upon the ground or a piece of wood, thus the term 'a score' or 'twenty'] representing the Twenty sheep that they have counted; and if they possess more than Twenty sheep, they go for another twenty:Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Another Twenty, another stone. Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Again,Twenty, again another stone.Jake Thackray 'Molly Metcalfe' 1971<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI</a>

ajuc超过 5 年前

As a native Polish speaker it was very strange to me when English speakers say things like "twelve hundreds" for numbers between 1000 and 2000. Nobody in Poland ever says that because we don't separate 200 into 2 words "two hundred" we say "dwieście" (which comes from two hundreds, but is significantly changed and considered separate word not 2 words joined). It sounds to us like "4 twenties" would sound to English people instead of "eighty".So because of language it's not natural to think of 1300 as 13*100, it's much more natural to think of it as 1000+300.But it's still better in Polish than in German ;) At least we don't do mixed endian like "hundred two and twenty" :)

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mumblemumble超过 5 年前

That point about Dutch children and little-endian names for numbers is a fun little nugget. The complaint is that they're forced to read the numbers backwards, when the numerals in question are Arabic numerals, invented by a culture that reads from right-to-left and has little-endian names for numbers. I would assume that kids who grow up speaking and learning math in Arabic have no such problems.

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cyberferret超过 5 年前

As a kid, I still remember the day that my dad was helping me with my Maths homework.On one tricky problem, he unconsciously started muttering the numbers out loud, and I was surprised to hear him saying them in Tamil (he is from Sri Lanka, but we spoke only English at home as far as I've known).I asked him about it later, and he said that in his head, he always translated the numbers or problems into Tamil, solved them, then translated back to English to present the solution - because he was taught maths as a kid in Tamil.He could still do all that faster than I could in all English!

gumby超过 5 年前

What an absurd Sapir-Whorfian argument. The English ten words are the same as the Chinese (e.g. “forty” is clearly “four-tens” with the corners knocked off). If summing two-digit numbers is slower for some cohort of kids it’s more likely the school system than language. For example german-speaking kids have a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but learn their multiplication tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12 as is customary in English, so can do more smaller multiplications in their head than folks raised in English.

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skrebbel超过 5 年前

I'm Dutch, and I've effectively made this change. Our number system sucks (though not as bad as the Danish one - which is my wife's language so I'm regularly forced to decipher that mess), whenever someone says a number like 47 out loud, I have to think hard about whether it's 47 or 74.So I've decided to generally stop doing maths in Dutch. Our company is international so we all work in English anyway so when I do stuff in eg Excel, calc.exe etc, I just count in English. When I speak in Dutch, I generally simply avoid the last digit in large-ish numbers. Eg I don't care what language I say "250" in, but when I'm speaking Dutch I'd round "252" to "about 250", which is fine enough in most contexts.FYI fun trivia: Norway fixed this about their language. They used to do what the Danes do but now it's like in English etc. They not only made up normal proper words for eg "50" or "90", but also reversed 2-digit numbers, eg "42" in Danish is "to-og-fyrre" and in modern Norwegian it's "førti-to". That's a pretty ballsy way to change a language and I'm jealous.

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ummonk超过 5 年前

> In other languages, the tens and units of numbers are inverted. For example, in Dutch, 94 is written vierënnegentig (or “four and ninety”), and other research suggests this may make it harder to do certain mathematical processes.>For example, Dutch kindergarten children performed worse than English children on a task that required them to roughly add together two-digit numbers. This was despite the fact they were slightly older and had better working memory, because Dutch kindergarten starts later than in the UK. But on nearly every other metric, including counting ability, roughly adding and comparing quantities of dots, and simple addition of single-digit numbers, the two groups performed at the same level.This is rather surprising. I would have guessed that adding numbers verbalized in little endian order would be easier because it makes carryover much more natural.

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jt2190超过 5 年前

> in English, words like “twelve” or “eleven” don’t give many clues as to the structure of the number itself... Contrast this with Mandarin Chinese, where the relationship between the tens and the units is very clear. Here, 92 is written jiǔ shí èr, which translates as “nine ten two”... Psychologists call systems like these “transparent”, where there is an obvious and consistent link between numbers and their names.Relatedly, I've been thinking a lot lately about programming style conventions, and how some people prefer very explicit code while others prefer implicit. For example, something as "simple" as leaving out the return keyword where it can be omitted at the end of a function versus leaving it in. The latter can be called "transparent", whereas the former requires a little deeper knowledge of the system.

Razengan超过 5 年前

This brings up a point that has always eerily intrigued me: Can you even count at all -without- a language?Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a clump of 5 trees and knowing it’s 5 without having to “say” “five” in your head.But try tapping on the desk or clapping your hands and counting how many times you did it without saying/thinking “1, 2, 3, 4...”I wonder if associating a transient stream of inputs with a count may be impossible without mapping it to some other sequence in your head, like linguistic numbers/letters.

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oefrha超过 5 年前

I think one good test of the counting-friendliness of a language is reciting the digits of pi (the limitation is obvious: only single digits are considered).Among the few languages I know, I can easily recite the first twenty digits after the decimal point in Mandarin within three seconds. In English it’s just painful, at least for me.

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armagon超过 5 年前

This makes me feel better for thinking that the way we write (standard Western) music impedes understanding of the way modern chromatic music sounds.And for the same reasons, really. Putting together things like "Four Twenties" makes sense when you only count to a hundred, and less sense when you need to, say, express the speed of light or the size of an electron. I'm sure the musical system made a lot more sense with diatonic sounds, but once you add in accidentals, you're just retaining backwards compatibility because it used to work and the then-living people were familiar with it.

yesenadam超过 5 年前

Improper representations are frowned upon in school, but they have their place. Once, a niece of mine in kindergarten told me she knew what 3 times 11 was: 33.I asked "Well then, what's 7 times 11?""It's seventy-seven.""Okay, I bet you don't know what 12 times 11 is.""Twelvety-twelve", she gleefully replied.We agreed that twelvety-twelve is a perfectly good number, we know what it is, but if we were talking to other people we would tell them one hundred and thirty two – for us, twelvety-twelve is just fine.– Bill Thurston, Groups, Tilings and Finite State Automata

jedberg超过 5 年前

My wife learned Cantonese as her first launguage and English as her second. I learned Cantonese in college. It’s way easier to count in Cantonese because it is so regular.As a bonus, a native asian language speaker effectively has to learn place value at a very young age to learn how to count.My wife learned all of her math skills in English, but she still sometimes counts in Cantonese. When we play blackjack, if I’m taking too long she’ll tell me the value of my cards in Cantonese, because she’s adding them in her head in Cantonese.It’s just quicker.

reportgunner超过 5 年前

In Czech they often say "triadvacet" which literally translated means "threeandtwenty" and I can't help to not think they said 32 every time I hear it.

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macintux超过 5 年前

This doesn’t surprise me at all.Obviously not a direct correlation, but I’ve been surprised at how critical my internal vocalization of words is to my ability to solve a word puzzle game I’ve been playing recently.In short, my ability to find a word that matches a pattern of blank letters is almost entirely dependent on my ability to pronounce those that might fit. If the word that matches has a pronunciation that doesn’t quite fit the usual patterns, I’ll have a very hard time recognizing it.

tow21超过 5 年前

My favourite illogical system is archaic Finnish, where it goes (roughly translated)One, two, three, ... Second-one (11), second-two (12), second-three (13), ... Third-one (21), third-two (22), third-three (23), ...ie you have an off-by-one error in the tens digit as you are counting.Modern Finnish retains this for 11-19, but mercifully sanity returns for numbers above that.

tasogare超过 5 年前

> Of course, there are many other reasons why children from different countries might have different mathematical abilities, including how maths is taught and attitudes towards education. It’s normally hard to control for these factors when studying people from different cultures – but one language offers a fascinating solution.I read that as: of course, we know there are other possible explanations but we won’t dive in the research literature and we’ll instead indulge ourselves in this Sapir-Whorf based article because it’s good click bait.The only interesting fact presented is that there is a slightly performance penalty in execution (not result) on some arithmetical tasks that never happen in real life based on the way to express numbers in subject’s native language.

csours超过 5 年前

Tom Scott and Why Klingon is Simpler Than Danish.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc</a>

agumonkey超过 5 年前

Similar things have been said about Chinese numbering.

huguesdk超过 5 年前

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten one, ten two, ten three… ten nine, two ten, two ten one, two ten two,… three ten,… nine ten,… hundred one, hundred two,… hundred ten one, … two hundred, … two million three hundred four ten five thousand six hundred seven ten eight

Lagogarda超过 5 年前

"might" is the word of the day