I believe the old GPO rule was not to say 'treble'. I cannot remember whether it was 'three double three' or 'double three three' but I believe 'treble three' was not allowed.
Can anyone confirm?
True. I think "three score years and ten" is Biblical in origin (as in "the allotted span of man is three score years and ten" or some such phrase). Surprising that at the time when the King James Bible was written, 70 was regarded as a good age, because we tend to think that living that long is something that only happened in the last 100 years.
It's interesting that English has evolved from four-and-twenty-blackbirds (units before tens) and three-score-and-ten (multiples of twenty rather than
10) but Germanic languages (German and Dutch) still keep blackbird notation, and French still keeps four-twenties-and-eleven notation.Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic all seem to have English ordering (Google Translate helped there!), as do Scottish and Irish Gaelic by the looks of things. Going further afield, Greek, Polish, Russian, Basque are the same. Arabic *looks* to be units before tens - until you remember that they write from right to left...
Yes, that's why I said "some or all of", to cover myself. I remember reading a book about WWII where a German spy masquerading as a Belgian-French (or Swiss-French or Luxemburg-French) was unmasked because he used the French-French "quatre-vignts-onze" notation instead of the local variant "nonante-et-un".
Belgium uses septante and nonante, but still quatre-vignts (only adding on 1 to 9, not 10 to 19).
Switzerland uses septante, huitante and nonante. Sensible Swiss!
Or better 'point 5 percent'. We were taught to not announce and leading zeros.
Cheers, T i m
Interesting. In the 1970s at school, my maths and science teachers all drummed it into us that numbers with an absolute value less than 1 must always be said and written with a leading 0: "nought point three seven" or "0.37", never "point three seven" or ".37". OK, colloquially the nought gets omitted, but in official verbal or written reports it must always be there. My maths teacher bemoaned that log tables just listed the digits after the decimal point; he felt that all the columns in the tables should be written as 0.1234 etc but accepted that he was being a King Canute on that one ;-)
It was only later, in the sixth form, that we were encouraged in physics and chemistry to wrote numbers in "engineering notation" - a number between 1 and 999 (perhaps with a decimal part as well) multiplied by a power of 10 that was a multiple of three: so 0.37 would be 370 x 10^-3 [units] or 370 milli[units] and 0.0037 would be 3.7 x 10^-3 and not 37 x 10^-4 or 370 x
10^-5 because the last two are not multiple-of-three exponents. This roughly coincided with the changeover of car rev counters from 10, 20, 30 x 100 rpm to 1, 2, 3 x 1000 rpm.
Some years ago (30), in Geneva, I needed to buy a camera battery. It was SF9.99, but despite never rhaving heard the Swiss way of counting before, I knew exactly how much I was asked for
Most people will use a call blocker from their telecom company these days, or get a truecall device either built into the phone or stand alone. Very easy to use. Sadly if the number is bogus as many are, if you block it they will just use a different one as they do when they call my phobile.
Brian
Extra digits don't usually matter, so just tell them to keep dialing threes until someone answers ;)
SteveW
And Diane Abbot can count up to eleventy seven
huitante as I recall. Belgian/Swiss french is quatre vingt
Wrong way around. French French uses quatre vingt.
SteveW
Chris Green laid this down on his screen :
Both of my parents used that form, so I can use and understand it, though I never use it.
Brian Gaff used his keyboard to write :
They spoof their numbers usually, so there is no way to trace them and complain.
So I block all, except known numbers - they soon get fed up of ringing and I assume blacklist your number.
Didn't stop them from naming the well-known game, 'Fortnite'.
It can be confusing - I heard and used huitante in France no problem (having learned to count in Italian before French, where it's ottanta / cf/ huitante).
That said I don't hear any confusion with something like douze:quatre- vingt-cinq:trente-six;cinquante-deux (for example) ?
Yes, as long as you parse the number in twos it is *mostly* unambiguous.
In the cartoon
There is the confusion between:
quatre-vingts, onze, trente-six (80 11 36)
and
quatre-vingts-onze, trente-six (91 36)
So they need to put a long pause in the first one!
The same applies to any number in the range 2-19 that follows 80 (not for 1 because 21, 31, ..., 91 all have *et* un, so you've be able to distinguish between 81 (quatre-vignts-et-un) and 80 1 (quatre-vignts [pause] un).
Do French numbers with an odd number of digits get parsed into two from the left or the right?
Is it:
1 23 45 67 (un vignt-trois quarante-cinq soixante-sept)or
12 34 56 7 (douze trente-quatre cinquante-six sept)I presume the second, to avoid the quatre vingt (4 20) or quatre-vignts (80) confusion.
How common is it in non-English-speaking countries for phone numbers to be divided into tens-and-units pairs (forty one, fifty seven) rather than saying each digit separately with suitable pauses at conventional intervals? Given the potential for confusion in French, and the backwards-way-round counting in German and Dutch, you'd think that those countries, out of all of them, would *not* make tens-and-units numbers.
And if you agree to meet them at 'half 5' they'll be there at 4:30....
I was wise to that one when I went over to demonstrate my company's product at Hannover Fair, and always said "halb nach funf": even though the "past" is redundant in German for half-past, they knew what I meant. Or else I said "siebzehn uhr dreissig" (seventeen thirty). Or else I arranged to meet at 25 past or 25 to, when both languages use the same construction ;-)
Some women at a bus stop were speaking French while my wife was also waiting.
One of the women asked my wife, in English, for some directiona.
My wife told her to catch a 77 bus and the women returned to her group.
My wife asked "Where in Belgium are you from?"
"How did you know we are Belgian?"
"Because you said Septante Sept to your friends. If you were French you would have said Soixante Dix-Sept!"
The women were impressed!
(My wife didn't know at the time that it is the same in Switzerland.)
Which is what my mum taught me.
I've no idea which way I say it but my wife says I use either.
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