Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Roedy Green Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: number and words Date: Thu, 03 May 2012 14:28:23 -0700 Organization: Canadian Mind Products Lines: 62 Message-ID: References: <7d4884d6-aebf-436e-8a76-1e2a3bf10c8b@n1g2000vby.googlegroups.com> <12ed676d-b3c2-409d-bce2-0e731adf8aeb@n4g2000vbz.googlegroups.com> Reply-To: Roedy Green NNTP-Posting-Host: Z2l1DcCELS0rATq8NqV4Sw.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 6.00/32.1186 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:14223 On Thu, 3 May 2012 15:12:25 +0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said : >or, as a simpler example 21 = "twenty one" or "ein und zwanzig", but it >wasn't all that long ago that English also used the German spoken number >order, as in "a maid of just one and twenty summers" not all that long ago... A. E. Housman (1859 1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896. XIII. When I was one-and-twenty WHEN I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, ‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, ‘The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.’ And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true. When I wrote InWords, I found native speakers arguing about how various numbers should be expressed. Perhaps these rules are not written down in some official place. They may be like local dialects. For Dutch, to settle the disputes I ended up writing Dutch, Old Dutch and Bankers' Dutch variants. Similarly there are two Spanish variants. Naming pairs of groups of animals is called the art of venery, e.g. a brace of pheasants. Knights would haze pages for not having this all memorized. See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/venery.html I wonder why number pronunciations are so needlessly complicated. It could be for similar hazing, class distinction, or perhaps to make numbers more distinct so they could be communicated under less than ideal conditions. It is not just numbers. It is grammar, pronouns, irregular verbs. They are more complicated that necessary lacking symmetry. Children, when they are learning the language try to correct it. -- Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com Programmers love to create simplified replacements for HTML. They forget that the simplest language is the one you already know. They also forget that their simple little markup language will bit by bit become even more convoluted and complicated than HTML because of the unplanned way it grows. .