• mamarguerat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      In Swiss French we say « septante » (70) « huitante » (80) and « nonante » (90) which is better than counting by 20

    • burningmatches@feddit.uk
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      English used to do this too. The most famous example is the first line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address:

      Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

    • Ophy@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      As a programmer and a linguist, this is the kind of content that really gets the happy chemicals flowing through my monkey brain

  • phedolin@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    German translation probably boils down to:

    farbe = '#9FA²'

    More efficient, saves half the characters!

    • Kiwy
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      Joke aside, it’s not taught as 4 × 20 +10 but simply “90 is pronounced quatre-vingt-dix” — which kinda is a mouthful, but you rarely count to 90 as a kid anyway.

  • somada2kk@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    As guy who hate French language and was learning in 1999 I can confirm it was pain to read the topic of lesson and the date. I was so happy when we switched to 2000.

    • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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      Whole generations of French students that have no idea they escaped having to write “mille neuf cent quatre-vingt dix-neuf” over and over again, in cursive of course.

  • blazarious@mylem.me
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    1 year ago

    I’d argue it’s 4*20+19 in French, though, otherwise you’d probably need to change some of the other 99 to 90+9.

    • SolanumChillEse@lemmy.world
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      Nineteen is dix-neuf though. Which is literally ten-nine. 11-16 all have an equivalent word to the English “teens.” Quatorze for example instead of dix-quatre for 14.

      • blazarious@mylem.me
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        1 year ago

        Yes but 99 is also literally ninety nine, so the English ones should be 90+9 🤷‍♂️ don’t know about Spanish, though

    • GewoehnlicherHamster@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Takes notes

      Next time meeting someone who might speaks french: Pontjur fellow frenchman, i need cat wank deez nutz of those poms

      • MouseWithBeer@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        The American is how it is supposed to be.

        The British one has the “color” changed changed to “colour” due to British spelling of color.

        The Spanish one has an upside down semi colon because in Spanish you write questions like this: ¿Is this an example question?

        The French one is because the French number system makes absolutely no sense and to say 99 you have to say quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (meaning 4 x 20 + 19).

        I hope this helps somehow.

        • nintendiator@feddit.cl
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          1 year ago

          The American is how it is supposed to be.

          The British one has the “color” changed

          [citation needed]

          • MouseWithBeer@iusearchlinux.fyi
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            1 year ago

            I mean in code. Not sure how many programming languages are gonna accept “colour”. Or maybe they do and I am wrong, tbf I never thought about it till now.

            When it actually comes to the English language that’s a different story.

            • nintendiator@feddit.cl
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              I don’t know any language where “colo[u]r” is a keyword, or a lexer-level entity tbh, so I’m not sure there would be any difference. Anywhere you can name a variable “color”, you can name it “colour”. C++ allows you to explicitly make one an alias to the other, for example.

              That said, I’ve seen a number of BBCode parsers need to take both “[color=”] and “[colour=]”. Really, we need code and programming languages in general to be less American. It’s 2023 already and in many programming languages I have to name my accounting variables “ano” (butthole) instead of “año” (year).

          • MouseWithBeer@iusearchlinux.fyi
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            1 year ago

            The image mentions British so I just mentioned Birtish. I am not American or even a native English speaker so don’t come at me. Also I hope the Czechoslovakia part is a joke.

            Your comment double posted btw.

      • AlternActive@lemmy.world
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        French being french. They have no word for ninety for example, it’s four-twenty-ten. Not bullshitting you.

        As in Four (times) twenty (plus) 10.

  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Wait, spanish doesn’t do the “we don’t have a word for that number, just do math instead” counting system?? I thought the romance languages were tight!

    • jorge@sopuli.xyz
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      Well, there isn’t a word for 99 in Spanish or English, in both languages we say 90+9, so that counts as maths.

      If you are asking about words for 70, 80 and 90, that is a peculiarity of French, and not even all dialects, some dialects have septante, huitante/octante and nonante for those.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.de
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      haha no

      It’s just the French being weird, there’s even some non-France French dialects that count normally.

      The Spanish might talk too fast to understand anyway, though.

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      French is the only Romance language that does the count-by-twenties thing, as far as I know, but apparently some of the Celtic languages do it too. So French may have picked it up from Breton (or Gaulish or who-knows).

      • alr@programming.dev
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        The Danish word for 99 is nioghalvfems, which literally means “nine and half five.” Which you could be forgiven for assuming meant 11½. The trick is that a) “half five” actually means 4½, as in half less than five, and b) it’s implied that you’re supposed to multiply the second part by 20. So the proper math is 9 + (-½ + 5) * 20 = 99.