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Heaven: 2021 Proof Americans and Brits speak a different language

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  • Pigwidgeon wrote: »
    Many years ago when driving through northern Arizona we were listening to the news on a Navajo radio station. We had no idea what they were saying, but we enjoyed the sound of it. I got the impression that they did not have words for really large numbers. While going on and on in Navajo, they would suddenly use the word "million" or "billion." (The only other words I understood were names, mostly of politicians.)
    Oddly the Navajo language is of the same language group as Dené (Chipewayan) which is north central Canada (borders of Alberta-Saskatchewan-Northwest Territories), very far away. They can understand each other.
  • orfeoorfeo Suspended
    mousethief wrote: »
    orfeo wrote: »
    Just try counting verbally in Danish and you'll never complain about alternatives again.

    It's like a committee decided to take the worst features of French and German counting, combine them, and throw in a bit of abbreviation to make things worse.

    The result? 93 = "three and half-fives".

    And in French of course it's four-twenties-and-thirteen.

    Yes. Which I maintain is a lot more comprehensible than "three and half-fives".
  • Pigwidgeon wrote: »
    mousethief wrote: »
    And in French of course it's four-twenties-and-thirteen.
    Rather similar to eighty-seven being "four score and seven."

    Yes, although that was for show, not sheer necessity.
  • orfeo wrote: »
    mousethief wrote: »
    orfeo wrote: »
    Just try counting verbally in Danish and you'll never complain about alternatives again.

    It's like a committee decided to take the worst features of French and German counting, combine them, and throw in a bit of abbreviation to make things worse.

    The result? 93 = "three and half-fives".

    And in French of course it's four-twenties-and-thirteen.

    Yes. Which I maintain is a lot more comprehensible than "three and half-fives".

    No question.
  • Pigwidgeon wrote: »
    Many years ago when driving through northern Arizona we were listening to the news on a Navajo radio station. We had no idea what they were saying, but we enjoyed the sound of it. I got the impression that they did not have words for really large numbers. While going on and on in Navajo, they would suddenly use the word "million" or "billion." (The only other words I understood were names, mostly of politicians.)
    Oddly the Navajo language is of the same language group as Dené (Chipewayan) which is north central Canada (borders of Alberta-Saskatchewan-Northwest Territories), very far away. They can understand each other.

    Somebody walked a long way.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    mousethief wrote: »
    orfeo wrote: »
    mousethief wrote: »
    orfeo wrote: »
    Just try counting verbally in Danish and you'll never complain about alternatives again.

    It's like a committee decided to take the worst features of French and German counting, combine them, and throw in a bit of abbreviation to make things worse.

    The result? 93 = "three and half-fives".

    And in French of course it's four-twenties-and-thirteen.

    Yes. Which I maintain is a lot more comprehensible than "three and half-fives".

    No question.

    I can't for the life of me work out how three and half-fives comes to 93
  • The only way I can make that work is if it's parsed as:

    Three plus half from five multiplied by twenty

    3 + [(5 - 0.5) x 20]

    This assumes it's a vigesimal system, but truly bizarre,
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    So vigesimal is in scores, like counting sheep?
  • To continue the tangent if I may, many east Asian languages have 10 000 as the basic large number. Sometimes they group the zeros in fours, so in Japanese 1 Man is 1,0000. Man man, or 1 oku is 1,0000,0000. In other words 100 million. Very confusing. In English the literal meaning of a myriad is 10,000 but it is almost always used figuratively to mean a huge number.
  • Yes, vigesimal is based of units of twenty ( I think from the Latin for 20)
    Of course in some parts of the north of England they still count their sheep in Norse: yan, tan, thethera . . . .
  • SparrowSparrow Shipmate
    And Terry Pratchett's Discworld trolls count like this of course:


    Many
    Many Many
    Many Many Many
    Many Many Many Many
    LOTS
  • There are in fact some cultures that haven't developed a counting system so can only count : one, two, many, many more.

    Such communities hold property in common, and therefore have no need to count sheep, goats or anything else, because everything is owned by everyone.
  • Robertus L wrote: »
    There are in fact some cultures that haven't developed a counting system so can only count : one, two, many, many more.

    Such communities hold property in common, and therefore have no need to count sheep, goats or anything else, because everything is owned by everyone.

    There are plenty of reasons to count, even in a society where everybody holds all property in common. One very obvious one: Did as many sheep come back this evening as went out this morning?
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Robertus L wrote: »
    Yes, vigesimal is based of units of twenty ( I think from the Latin for 20)
    Of course in some parts of the north of England they still count their sheep in Norse: yan, tan, thethera . . . .

    Actually they don't. The Cumbric Score is one of those odd things which crops up in various places but no-one seems to able to find anyone who uses it.

    It's usually claimed to be Cumbric rather than Norse; it is a bit of a mixture - yan and tan are Germanic; pimp (5), dik (10), bumfit (15) and their variations seem more Brittonic. Other numbers are alliterative pairs.
  • That is true of course: perhaps their shepherds are especially attentive. The concept of crespondance is understood (i.e. There are as many sheep are there are stones in my hand - about the level of a cricket umpire 😀)*

    Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that their counting system does not support arithmetic processing.


    * for those unfamiliar with cricket, each 'over' (that is each period of play) consists of six balls being bowled - umpires traditionally keep count of balls by transferring pebbles from one pocket to the other)
  • Thing is, you can avoid counting sheep is you recognize each by name. Then you know if one goes missing.

    I would really like to know which non-counting cultures these are, though. Maybe I'll do a stroll through Google later, if nobody knows names here.
  • The best studied anumeric cultures are the Pirahi and Ma nduruku clans (spelling from memory) of South America, though IIRC the later do have a slightly more 'advanced' system. There are, also some tribes on Papua New Guinea that have not developed counting systems that go much beyond 4 or 5 ( depend if you think thumbs are digits)
  • I can't remember the term off the top of my head, but there is a demotic Welsh term for 99 that translates as, 'Except one, five twenties.'
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    mousethief wrote: »
    orfeo wrote: »
    ...

    The result? 93 = "three and half-fives".

    And in French of course it's four-twenties-and-thirteen.
    Yes, in French French, but in some French speaking countries, such as Belgium, that would be 'nonante-trois'.

    Does any Shipmate know which it would be in Montreal?

  • I can't remember the term off the top of my head, but there is a demotic Welsh term for 99 that translates as, 'Except one, five twenties.'

    The one I know is; cant comyn un (= a hundred but one), considerably less of a mouth full than : pedwar ar pumdeg ar deg ac pedair ugain* = four on fifteen on ten plus four twenties

    * I'm not sure that's the right spelling I've probably missed a mutation somewher, but it's the right concept
  • Robertus L wrote: »
    The best studied anumeric cultures are the Pirahi and Ma nduruku clans (spelling from memory) of South America, though IIRC the later do have a slightly more 'advanced' system. There are, also some tribes on Papua New Guinea that have not developed counting systems that go much beyond 4 or 5 ( depend if you think thumbs are digits)

    Thank you!
  • AravisAravis Shipmate
    And there’s Lapine, the language of the rabbits in Watership Down, where anything over five is “hrair”. The little rabbit known as Fiver is “Hrair-roo”, the last in a large litter, but they also use “hrair” as a word connected with fear as it symbolizes the numerous natural enemies of the rabbit.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Robertus L wrote: »
    I can't remember the term off the top of my head, but there is a demotic Welsh term for 99 that translates as, 'Except one, five twenties.'

    The one I know is; cant comyn un (= a hundred but one), considerably less of a mouth full than : pedwar ar pumdeg ar deg ac pedair ugain* = four on fifteen on ten plus four twenties

    * I'm not sure that's the right spelling I've probably missed a mutation somewher, but it's the right concept

    Nearly all of them, though how many people would use phedair after a these days? Bastards, aren't they, treigladdau?
  • AthrawesAthrawes Shipmate
    There are some indigenous cultures in Australia that count by naming things. I don’t think there are numbers as such at all. From (very vague) memory Warradjuri is one of them.
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    Robertus L wrote: »
    I can't remember the term off the top of my head, but there is a demotic Welsh term for 99 that translates as, 'Except one, five twenties.'

    The one I know is; cant comyn un (= a hundred but one), considerably less of a mouth full than : pedwar ar pumdeg ar deg ac pedair ugain* = four on fifteen on ten plus four twenties

    * I'm not sure that's the right spelling I've probably missed a mutation somewher, but it's the right concept

    Nearly all of them, though how many people would use phedair after a these days? Bastards, aren't they, treigladdau?

    I'm not sure that in reality anybody really went through the rigmarole of the full version when you can just say 'one less than a hundred'. If I had a Welsh bible to hand I could check how the 99 sheep in the parable is translated (but as KarlLB will know using numbers and nouns is a whole other problem)

    Aspirant mutations can, as I've said give rise some funny bilingual problems: the Welsh for 'packed lunch' is pecyn bwyd (= packed food), but under certain mutations this becomes phecyn fwyd, which sounds dangerously close to the English 'f***in' food' adolescents in bilingual schools can have a lot of fun with monoglot English teachers, the Welsh for (female) teacher is of course athrawes, (see what I've done there:😁):
    Athrawes wrote: »
    There are some indigenous cultures in Australia that count by naming things. I don’t think there are numbers as such at all. From (very vague) memory Warradjuri is one of them.

    I know that there is a variety of practice amongst Aboriginal peoples, but I'm less familiar with these than with theSouth American tribes. Anumeric cultures are more numerous that we might think.
  • Pigwidgeon wrote: »
    Many years ago when driving through northern Arizona we were listening to the news on a Navajo radio station. We had no idea what they were saying, but we enjoyed the sound of it. I got the impression that they did not have words for really large numbers. While going on and on in Navajo, they would suddenly use the word "million" or "billion." (The only other words I understood were names, mostly of politicians.)

    I got a plastic flower pen from a Native American petrol station attendant in Page, AZ. I went in to pre-pay and saw her with it and wanted to buy one (assuming they sold them at the shop). They didn't and I went out to fill the car up. The attendant ran out, gave me the pen, and ran back inside. It is one of my favorite travel memories.
  • LydaLyda Shipmate
    Tangent: Klingon has
    1 – wa’
    2 – cha’
    3 – wej
    4 – loS
    5 – vagh
    6 – jav
    7 – Soch
    8 – chorgh
    9 – Hut
    10 – wa’maH

    Klingon might be considered scifi Esperanto. :wink:
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Long ago, I read a book called "1, 2, 3, Many" (IIRC). It was about number systems in various cultures. The title is a sample. Don't remember what culture it's from.

    Might be handy for a group of 3 people, or 3 groups of people. "1, 2, 3...ooo, we have extra!"
  • orfeoorfeo Suspended
    edited April 2020
    Robertus L wrote: »
    The only way I can make that work is if it's parsed as:

    Three plus half from five multiplied by twenty

    3 + [(5 - 0.5) x 20]

    This assumes it's a vigesimal system, but truly bizarre,

    Bingo. You have it. Welcome to Danish counting.

    Though I think the origin is not so much "half from five" as "halfway to five from four", though I'd have to go look some things up to be certain.

    It's okay up until 40, but then 50 is based on "half-threes", 60 is based on "threes" etc.

    Plus they do the German thing of putting the units first.

    My understanding is that even the Swedes and Norwegians, who essentially speak the same language (the whole language vs dialect thing is well illustrated by these), look at Danish counting and think "What the devil are you doing?"
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Sussex. One-ery, twoery, cockery, shoe-ery, sitherum, satherum, wineberry, wagtail, tarradiddle, den. Each word for two sheep. On den, cut score on stick. Hence score for 20. But if there's any Old English, Celtic or Norse lurking in there, I'd be surprised*. I used to have a set of poetry books with a variation of the Cumbrian counts in the footer of each page, one word to a right opening.
    *I have concerns about the third and fourth words - I suspect bawdry.
  • orfeoorfeo Suspended
    edited April 2020
    Addendum: having found the material I was thinking of, it's more accurate to say that 50 is based on "half-third" rather than "half-three".

    It's "half-the-third-lot-of-twenty" and so on.

    But Danes never found a word they couldn't collapse so that most of the syllables disappear. These instructions on how to pronounce any Danish word were first shared with me by my own Danish teacher.

    [code fix-jj-HH]
  • Just reading about the word craic, incredible history, starting as English crack, then into Irish as craic, and of course, Irish English, also in Scots and Ulster dialects, see Wiki.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    'Come your ceilidh' is another collision of Irish/English familiar to me. No actual music was involved: it was simply an invitation to socialise (ah yes, remember that?)
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    Firenze wrote: »
    'Come your ceilidh' is another collision of Irish/English familiar to me. No actual music was involved: it was simply an invitation to socialise (ah yes, remember that?)
    That's an idiom unknown to me. A ceilidh, to me, always involves music, craic and plenty of liquid refreshment.

    @quetzalcoatl I'd never realised 'craic' was originally borrowed from English. I mean, I'd just as happily spell it 'crack' and as an expression, it always seems to have been around, just to have got more popular and more emphatically Irish somehow. Thank you. That was interesting.

    The other curious one of these is the Irish bouzouki. It is strung differently from a Greek one, but derives from Greek instruments Irish musicians brought back from Greece when the package holiday began to develop in the 1960s. They then altered it to suit what they wanted to do with it.

  • Gramps49Gramps49 Shipmate
    I found this image on which English accent is the easiest to understand was interesting.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Gramps49 wrote: »
    I found this image on which English accent is the easiest to understand was interesting.

    Easiest for whom though?
  • Horrible name on that diagram. I do not have an English Accent. Nor do the Americans, Canadians, Irish, Welsh, New Zealanders who also feature on the graphic. We speak English, but that is a different thing.
  • It seems pointless to me, since everyone presumably finds accents easier, which are like their own.
  • Robert ArminRobert Armin Shipmate, Glory
    Is it because most broadcasting has been in Received Pronunciation until recently? I find it odd that most Americans seem to understand the diversity of accents in their own country, but get defeated by Manchester (for example).
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    What's the source of the diagram and from what dialectical standpoint is it written? I tried to work this out from the page but there doesn't seem to be any link to the Home page of whatever site it comes from.

    It's slightly sad that it also omits some of the smaller speech communities that are first language English speaking.

    I can see why to some there might be a small blob of lower intelligibility round Birmingham, but what have Bristol and Bath done to deserve one?

  • Is it a spoof?
  • I suspect it's US based as the West Country is regarded as comprehensible and not the accent less like those who came over with the Pilgrim Fathers are less so.
  • Nick TamenNick Tamen Shipmate
    edited April 2020
    Is it because most broadcasting has been in Received Pronunciation until recently? I find it odd that most Americans seem to understand the diversity of accents in their own country, but get defeated by Manchester (for example).
    Well looking at the map, you’d get the impression there are only 3 or 4 accents in the US, and only 2 each in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. I’d say we need the roll eyes emoji, but I’m not sure that would be enough.

    The chart says “From the perspective of u/bezzleford,” who apparently is a Reddit user. So there you go.

    I suspect it's US based . . . .
    I doubt it. bezzleford (which sounds kind of Englishy) has lots of these charts, and they almost all focus on the UK or Europe.

  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    He has a home marked in Essex on the Estuary, and apparently has no problem with Geordie.
  • orfeoorfeo Suspended
    Yes, all of you asking for the standpoint, there is literally a little home logo on the map.
  • Besides, only an English person would call all these accents English.😒
  • Is it because most broadcasting has been in Received Pronunciation until recently? I find it odd that most Americans seem to understand the diversity of accents in their own country, but get defeated by Manchester (for example).

    It's down to practice. What you run into the most often, you learn to understand. (I've been woman in the middle in a series of three English speakers, but the ones on either side were heavily accented and mutually unintelligible. Think a local Midwestern black doctor asking questions, which I repeat in my own California accent, which Mr Lamb repeats in Vietnamese to the patient--who answers in Vietnamese, with Mr Lamb translating into Vietnamese-accented English, which I change to Californian, which the doctor understands.

    It's a riot.
  • Gramps49Gramps49 Shipmate
    Remember, I started this thread as a spoof. I thought I would continue the humor by posting a link that is absurd. Of course, it only gives the perspective of the individual who made the map. Note he identifies where his home is and everything moves out from there.

    I have seen a similar map made from an Italian perspective that ranks the national cuisines of Europe. Want to guess where it puts most English foods? (from barely edible to toxic). It says Americans make fake pizza and the Chinese make fake pasta.
  • AravisAravis Shipmate
    Aha. Found my Welsh New Testament and the ninety-nine are translated “naw deg a naw” (which is what I’d have said, as I think I was taught a modernized Welsh counting system).
    The problems re mutations of consonants for packed lunches in Welsh hadn’t occurred to me. But I did once hoot out loud with laughter when I noticed Asda had dutifully translated the sign above the tins of beans as “Ffa tun”.
    (The letter u makes a short “i” sound in that context)
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    We should be grateful that chickpeas aren't Ffa Cyw, as they could so easily have been.
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