The Danish numeral system is ridiculous. In fact, leading numeral systems geeks have named it the 16th silliest system in the world.
The main problem about the system is that it’s not a system - it’s three systems with no interconnection whatsoever that have been thrown into a hat, given a good shake, pulled out again and arranged in a completely haphazard fashion. And as if this wasn’t enough, you also have to take into account that old folks use longer versions of some of the names of the numbers than younger people do.
Let me take you through it:
The numbers from 1 to 39 aren’t all that complicated. It’s just Danish pronunciations of the widespread 10-based system. But as soon as you reach the number 40 the mayhem begins.
The elderly would call 40 fyrretyve which is weird because fyrre comes from the word fire meaning 4 and tyve means 20 (or ‘thieves’, but don’t get me started on that one…) so the most logical thing to deduce from that would be that fyrretyve means 80. But it doesn’t. Fyrretyve derives from the Old Norse word fyritiughu, meaning ‘four tens’.
Younger Danes just use fyrre for 40 but that’s young people for you: lazy buggers all of them.
Let’s move on to the fifties. But before we can do that, we need to go back a bit and look at the way we talk about halves which is pretty messy too. 2½, 3½ and onwards are quite easy. We just say to og en halv - ‘two and a half’, tre og en halv - ‘three and a half’ and so on. But 1½ is called halvanden meaning ‘half second’ which is a relic from ancient times when we called 2½ halvtredie - ‘half third’, 3½ halvfjerde - ‘half fourth’ etc. There’s still a reminiscence of that in the names for the numbers 50 to 99. That, and the shift from a 10-based system to a 20-based system. Still with me?
Take 73. The full name for that one is treoghalvfjerdsindstyve meaning ‘three and half fourth times twenty’ since sinds comes from sinde meaning ‘times’ as in multiplication (and tyve meaning ‘twenty’ as you may remember). The young and hip version of 73 is the abbreviated treoghalvfjerds.
I told you: it’s ridiculous.
Actually, the Danish nomenclature of numbers is so nutty and daft that not even Danes know why the numbers are called what they are called. They just learn the names by heart. And for once - I don’t blame them.
6 Comments
great post, I always forget reasons behind the numerical system.
To make matters worse old official designations for grouping are also in daily use, for instance ’snes’ meaning twenty or ‘dusin’ meaning twelve.
In slang I’ve encountered ‘laks’ (salmon) meaning a thousand and ‘plovmand’ (man with plow) meaning 500 (from the imagery of a bank note that was used until the early 70′ies).
Maybe there is a slight perversion among danes concerning numerical systems.
This is brilliant.
I’ve always found it amusing that on the 50 kroner note, it reads Femti, which is ‘five tens’, which is the word for 50 in the other, more sensible, Scandinavian languages.
The Danes realise that no one else will know what ‘halvtreds’ means so they write it in Swedish/Norwegian.
It is not the number system that we use, which is silly, it is the naming of the numbers. The number system is sensible enough. It’s the Arabic one. It is much more useful than the Roman system (inconsistent ordering) or the binary system (way too many digits). Why is base 10 a good choice? Simply because most of us have ten fingers (and toes). Hexadecimal, i.e. base 16, would have been a good choice also as we’ve entered the age of computers, and base 16 is also nicely succinct.
The silly naming of numbers is hardly a big problem though, because almost any Dane will know the naming in English or some other world language.
In a vaguely related way, I’ve always loved the old tradition of counting life years in ’summers’. Usually when referring to a young woman.
‘Her name was Solveig… she was but 22 summers…’ Beats the hell out of ‘hun var to og tyve år gammel’
Poetic and rather lovely.
The thing I can’t seem to grasp is why phone numbers are read as if they are 4 sets of numbers, rather than 8 individual numbers. I remember my first year of Danish class when I was asked my phone number - which I said as single digits - and was promptly told that I was wrong. Not because the number was wrong, but because I didn’t read it like it was 4 numbers. Strange.
Nice post. I remember at danish class, we were made to play bingo to learn the numbers. So at least it was fun. What is annoying to me was when I am taking notes of telephone numbers while on the phone. Always have to leave a space for the digit before.