Breton counting systemīefore talking about this counting system, perhaps I should introduce you to the language.īreton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany, a region in north-west France. Or here for a more in-depth analysis of Danish numbers. “halvfems”)Ĭlick here for a full 1-100 list of Danish numbers. 90 – halvfemsindstyve (halv-fem-sind-s-tyve) – ½ 5th times 20 – (abbr.80 – firsindstyve (fir-sind-s-tyve) – 4 times 20 – (abbr.70 – halvfjerdsindstyve (halv-fjerd-sind-s-tyve) – ½ 4th times 20 – (abbr.60 – tresindstyve (tre-sind-s-tyve) – 3 times 20 – (abbr.This is the regular way of saying the number 50:įollowing the same logic, the actual names for numbers 60, 70, 80 and 90 as follows: The interesting thing about all this is that Danes don’t realize what they’re actually saying because these names you see are abbreviations of the actual forms, and thus they don’t make much sense to anyone. 91 – enoghalvfems (en-og-halvfems) – 1 and (4½ times 20)*.78 – otteoghalvfjerds (otte-og-halvfjerds) – 8 and (3½ times 20)*.56 – seksoghalvtreds (seks-og-halvtreds) – 6 and (2½ times 20)*.Let’s go to the next half then (muahaha). If you’ve ever studied German before, you’ll notice that Danish follows the same order, that is, they say “two-twenty” (2 and 20) and not “twenty-two” (20 and 2) as English does, but aside from that little detail the rest is not hard to understand.
Now, seriously, Danish is a bit like French in the sense that they use a decimal system for most of their numbers (actually, half of them) to suddenly change later. But I warn you, don’t let yourself be fooled by evil Danish! It’s all a wicked lie. Once we’ve all jogged our memory, let’s dive right into today’s languages, shall we? Danish counting systemĭanish has the kind of numerical system which invites you to be overconfident when you first have a look at it. “Oh, this looks fairly easy”, you might think at the beginning.
You might remember from last time that most of the “weird” counting systems in Europe are vigesimal at least in some way, which means that they base their numbers in groups of 20 instead of in groups of 10 like decimal systems do, the so-called “normal” systems, like in English or Spanish. This time we’ll tackle the remaining two languages I had chosen, Danish and Breton. In that very same post I said I was going to make a second part because otherwise it would have been way too long so…here’s part two! 😀 It’s already been a while, but last summer I wrote a post regarding interesting ways in which some European languages count.
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