Why are German numbers backwards?

https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/5009/why-are-german-numbers-backwards

by tosh • 5 years ago

288 419 5 years ago

german.stackexchange.com

Me as a foreign mother tongue find it really annoying, so I count in my head in my mother language.

There also has been a study, no matter if forward or backwards.. the first language you learned to count will be the language you use for counting in your head for the rest of your counting life

Isn't that cool? Never noticed, now Always pay attention to :)

gus_massa• 5 years ago

I also do most math in my native language, Spanish. When I'm silent reading text in English, most of the times I "say" the numbers in Spanish, but now always. Anyway, I have more intuition about numbers in Spanish, so even if I read it in English I may translate a few milliseconds later if I must think about it.

I can do some elementary calculations in English, like 2+3=5. But for more complicated stuff like the second derivative of x^3 I must switch to Spanish and translate the result.

Semaphor• 5 years ago

I’m split about 50/50 with German (native and residence) and English counting. But when I count in German and write numbers, I tend to make more mistakes because of them being "backwards" :(

davidkunz4• 5 years ago

Well, it's not really backwards, that would be too easy. Example:

3 482 975 is "dreimillionenvierhundertzweiundachzigtausendneunhundertfünfundsiebzig"

which is in pseudo English:

"three million four hundred two and eighty thousand nine hundred five and seventy"

Also beware of (German -> English):

Million -> million

Milliarde -> billion

Billion -> trillion

Billiarde -> quadrillion

etc.

kijin• 5 years ago

Oh, the joys of middle-endian notation.

But who are we to laugh at them, the American date notation (M-D-Y) is just as weird.

blago2• 5 years ago

I recently realized that M-D-Y makes a lot more sense than we give it credit for. Date formats needn't be about the cardinality of the units, in this case it's about spoken language. The M-D-Y format simply follows the order of the words in (EDIT: American) English. We say January 4th, 1970. Try reading D-M-Y in (EDIT: American) English and you will quickly realize that it doesn't make sense. I suspect most other spoken languages use 4th January, 1970 so D-M-Y feels more natural to them.

EDIT: I'm sorry if I offended you by equating American English with English. Point taken. I misspoke. The point remains.

lordgroff• 5 years ago

You could be Canada. MM-DD-YYYY? DD-MM-YYYY? Unless you're in Quebec, you never have a clue. Government officially recommends YYYY-MM-DD due to this, but in the real world it's wild west.

jeroenhd8• 5 years ago

Probably an unpopular opinion, but despite its stupid order, I think M-D-Y makes complete sense for (American) English.

Some languages (or dialects of English) say "twelve/the twelveth (of) January 2022", so 12-01-2022 is the obvious notation. Many English dialects (the majority, given that it's how America does it?) would say "January twelveth, 2022", so 01-12-2022.

It's not that the notation is spun around, some versions of English just pronounce the dates backwards! This is the exact opposite of the question asked about numbers, where English (usually, mostly) follows the "logical" order.

As language is subjective, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to pronounce and order things. The West doesn't use lakh and crore, but there's no reason why the short scale is any better. People just decided to say things one way and stick to it.

barbarbar2• 5 years ago

Isn't the last part:

nine hundred and seventy five?

azernik• 5 years ago

The point is that the way you say "seventy five" in German is "five and seventy"

davidkunz4• 5 years ago

in pseudo English (meaning a direct translation) it is "nine hundred five and seventy", in real English it is "nine hundred and seventy five"

rapnie• 5 years ago

Milliarde -> billion

Yeah, and you also see e.g. news anchors making mistakes in translation saying things like (Dutch) "Ze investeerden een biljoen". Turning a billion into a trillion.

And I also heard that Biden wants to pump a "triljoen" in the economy (quintillion)

dredmorbius3• 5 years ago

This is the short-scale / long-scale naming convention for powers of ten. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale

Million (10^6) / milliard (10^9) / billion (10^12) is, or at least was, common in British English, where American English is million / billion / trillion.

Numbers above 999 million were typically written as, e.g., "thousand million (10^9), million million (10^12), etc.

Long scale also has billiard and trilliard.

American usage seems to be dominant now, the UK officially converted in 1974.

qw2• 5 years ago

Norway used to have the same system, but the government introduced a reform in the 50s to simplify. Many still use the "old" way.

The "correct" modern way is the same as in English.

mr_toad2• 5 years ago

In UK English a billion used to mean a million million up until about 50 years ago.

folli• 5 years ago

It's still no match for French numbers: quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten) for 90.

ginko2• 5 years ago

Or Danish where 90 is halvfems or (5 - 1/2) * 20

hjek• 5 years ago

... which is especially embarrassing because they got rid of the problem in Swedish and Norwegian.

Symbiote• 5 years ago

95 could be spoken as "fifteen and four score" in English, and I'm told my great grandfather did this, though people thought he was old fashioned.

It would not be the Danish "five and half the fifth score" though. This is crazy.

xwolfi• 5 years ago

Yeah but I'd never blame someone for telling me "nonante", the Belgian (and more correct latin) variant.

Bud3• 5 years ago

French is not actually that weird; it's just weird from 80-99. From 10-79, it's just like English handles it. They just never came up with single words for 80 and 90.

MauranKilom• 5 years ago

It's also weird for 50-59. English does not say "fourty twelve" ("quarante-douze").

Lamad1232• 5 years ago

It's weird form 70-79 as well! To say 79, you need to say sixty-ten-nine!

CorrectHorseBat3• 5 years ago

But they actually did! Septante, huitant/octante and nonante are real French words. Only the French don't want to use them.

smoe• 5 years ago

I think various french speaking regions outside France do use single words for those. E.g. in neighboring Switzerland I learned 70, 80, and 90 as septante, huitante and nonante if I remember correctly (I'm from the german speaking part)

orthoxerox• 5 years ago

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation

Lamad1232• 5 years ago

nonante!

dan-robertson5• 5 years ago

There’s a joke in French:

What is 20*4?

Answer: 80 because multiplication is commutative.

Koshkin3• 5 years ago

Yet, Commutative Algebra is a German invention.

chrizel2• 5 years ago

German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.

Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.

FredPret3• 5 years ago

Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to 20, and then start saying “one”, “two”, until I get to thirty to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word for 21, 22, etc is “one-twenty”, “two-twenty”, etc, rather than “twenty-one” etc.

nkrisc• 5 years ago

You can do this in English or many other languages too if you want to.

ChuckNorris893• 5 years ago

Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too.

Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system, but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up.

Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness with the other party before the dictation starts.

So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs quickly.

Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to dictate it digit by digit and call it a day.

So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more problems than it solves.

lodovic• 5 years ago

But it's the same in English up until the number 20. 16 for example, six-ten. The English just count differently after 20. But I could imagine "four and seventy" for example.

moffkalast3• 5 years ago

And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example:

German: einhundertfünfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy)

Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy)

Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring languages:

Polish: sto siedemdziesiąt pięć (one hundred seventy five)

Czech: sto sedmdesát pět (one hundred seventy five)

Slovak: sto sedemdesiat päť (one hundred seventy five)

Hungarian: száz hetven öt (one hundred seventy five)

Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five)

Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five)

Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic

You get the idea.

Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system.

Sincerely, a Slovenian.

solidangle• 5 years ago

Dutch: honderdvijfenzeventig (hundred five and seventy)

jimmaswell2• 5 years ago

If you want something completely insane check out standard French. 97 is "quatre-vingt-dix-sept" which translates directly to "four-twenty-ten-seven". Quebec French does this sanely though at least.

kubav2• 5 years ago

German swapped numbers are also possible and correct in Czech language "sto sedmdesát pět" is the same as "sto pětasedmdesát".

krab• 5 years ago

In Czech, both variants are possible. The German one is less frequent, though.

someotherperson• 5 years ago

To add to the list, Arabic also counts the same way.

مائة وخمسة وسبعون (One hundred and five and seventy)

frankfrankfrank5• 5 years ago

You put so much effort into that and then totally missed French? four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course. Multiplication and addition required.

That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.

Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"

jhncls• 5 years ago

Even more loyal than the French to the ancient vigesimal counting system are the Basque[0] and the Welsh[1].

Traditional Welsh has constructions as:

- 16: un ar bymtheg ("one on five-ten") - 18: deunaw ("two nine") - 41: deugain ac un ("two twenty and one") - 71: un ar ddeg a thrigain ("one on ten on three twenty")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_numerals

froh• 5 years ago

French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen)

tlogan• 5 years ago

My understanding is that was the way in Serbian-Croatian but it died out. I personally knew people born in early 1900s talking like that. But I can be wrong: it could be just Autro-Hungarian influence.

Any real data on this?

frankfrankfrank5• 5 years ago

You are also forgetting that you are comparing two totally different language trees (Germanic and Slavic) … ignoring Italian for the moment.

You essentially listed German and several dialects of the same language. If you had listed several of the German language dialects that also slightly vary how they say the number in the same German format/order you would have had a list of equal if not greater number of support for the German format.

I think that may also provide a bit of a clue as to why the order/format is different since it must have happened some time after English formed from the German language, possibly when/because the British adopted the format/order of the Romans. But that's just speculation/hypothesis on my part. I suspect there are people who have a better insight into how that separation happened.

gbil• 5 years ago

taking the opportunity to say that the most voted answer in stackexchange is wrong for Greek, in Greek for example 175 is εκατόν εβδομήντα πέντε (one hundred seventy five)

de6u99er3• 5 years ago

And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example: Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five) Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic

As a German speaker with Ex-Yugoslavian roots, I'd like to point out that you have a mistake in your list.

In Serbo-Croatian (former official language of Yugoslavia) 175 (sto sedamdeset pet) is actually the order in which the number is written. Only between 10 and 20 the pronounciation is somewhat the other way around. But like the French colleague in this thread it could easily be argued that the numbers between 1 and 20 have their own words because it's not tri-deset but trinest for 13. This could be because e.g. tri-deset is actually used for 30, which sounds like three times ten. It seems Slovenian counting is more similar to German, while Serbo-Croatian is more similar to English.

Serbo-Croatian counting examples: 1 - jedan

2 - dva

3 - tri

4 - četiri

5 - pet

6 - šest

7 - sedam

8 - osam

9 - devet

10 - deset

11 - jedanest

12 - dvanest

13 - trinest

14 - četrnest

15 - petnest

16 - šesnest

17 - sedamnest

18 - osamnest

19 - devetnest

20 - dvadeset

21 - dvadeset jedan

32 - trideset dva

43 - četrdeset tri

54 - pedeset četiri

65 - šesdeset pet

76 - sedamdeset šest

87 - osamdeset sedam

98 - devedeset osam

100 - sto

101 - sto jedan

111 - sto jedanest

121 - sto dvadeset jedan

212 - dvesto dvanest

222 - dvesto dvadeset dva

...

bogeholm• 5 years ago

I’ll just add Danish: et hundrede og femoghalvfjerds (one hundred five and four scores where the fourth score is a half)

Sincerely, a Dane :)

jesprenj• 5 years ago

Stupid is debatable here. Computer processors also sometimes tend to use little endian numbers instead of big endian numbers. Germans and us Slovenians just seem to prefer attention to detail and put the most significant digit of a two digit number on the second place.

ZRC-SAZU might have some etymologycal answers.

On that note I notice that I usually misspell two digit numbers in Slovene. For example when writing a number, I usually write the right digit before the left when writing from dictation. Sometimes when I am thinking about a number I tend to say it the other way around, petindevetdeset instead of devetinpetdeset, even though I am a native speaker.

mimac• 5 years ago

Then you also have Slovenian dialects, where the number order is different again i.e. Prekmurscina - stou sendeset pet.

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

The Dutch get numbers “backwards,” too. My poor daughter makes mistakes with writing numerals all the time. Like, writing “27” for tweeënzeventig. Sigh. She will learn eventually. I’m sure the mental challenge just makes people strong here, like the bicycling in the freezing rain.

spockz• 5 years ago

In Dutch it is “honderd vijf en zeventig” (one hundred five and seventy). So the same as in German. Do we actually know the origin or reason?

midasuni2• 5 years ago

One hundred Five and Seventy is middle endian, neither big nor little.

The only other example I can think of is the american date system

mmcnl• 5 years ago

Same for Dutch.

Honderd-vijf-en-zeventig. Hundred five and seventy.

mcv• 5 years ago

Do they all say the "one" explicitly? In Dutch, it's "hunderdvijenzeventig", (hundred five and seventy), without the "one". That "one" is slightly more likely to be used with thousands, and a lot with millions.

mro_name3• 5 years ago

I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system.

do so and especially blame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emper... to whom Fibonacci dedicated his liber abaci on those fancy new numbers back then.

They must have messed it up introducing that to german day-to-day use. They did it in parts arab-ordered (spoken), half reading order, where sensible would have been right-to-left one digit after the other. So you wouldn't even have to count upfront.

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

I'm surprised Hungarians don't say 7 times 5 squared,

nathias2• 5 years ago

Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?

We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual digits for large numbers in any language.

chrizel2• 5 years ago

Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia?

Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems. And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more logical the way it is in English or other languages.

Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021) and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later with all its advantages.

varispeed• 5 years ago

When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn. I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these things I never got to learn this language, my brain just refused to memorise these rules :/

VortexDream• 5 years ago

Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.

otagekki2• 5 years ago

Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation, although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current that it's totally understandable in a way.

tgv• 5 years ago

If I have to dictate phone numbers

The problem also exists in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s

lowdose• 5 years ago

In Dutch it is the same way. We even have another word for billion. Billion in dutch means 1000x more than the English version. Compounding is translated as combined interest.

jeroenhd8• 5 years ago

English has million and milliard [0], but American English preferred the short scale and that has had more influence over the language. The UK only officially switched over to the "American" system in 1974.

Many European languages have the long scale, English is the odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still classify that as a European language.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale

jeroenhd8• 5 years ago

As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.

English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences.

I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe.

I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.

BoorishBears2• 5 years ago

As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time.

I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers

elliekelly• 5 years ago

Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying “it’s ten for half five” means it’s 4:20. (I think?) I’m really not sure I’ll ever have a solid understanding.

Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.

jerrre• 5 years ago

I'd translate it as ten before half five, but apart from that, yeah that's 4:20 (inclusive or 16:20).

I think in the UK they use half five as 5:30? Half past five basically. In NL it's half way towards five, maybe the Dutch are forward looking?

tharkun__4• 5 years ago

There are so many ways to say this in German and we mix it all the time, though some ways are more prevalent in certain areas. I'm leaving out the 'regular' version of just saying the numbers and such and there's also the fact that depending on situation (or how you feel that very second) you'll just say 4:20 or 16:20.

    4:05: 5 past 4
    4:10: ten past 4
    4:15: quarter past 4
    4:15: quarter 5
    4:20: ten to half 5
    4:20: 20 past 4
    4:30: half 5
    4:35: 5 past half 5
    4:40: 10 past half 5
    4:40: 20 to 5
    4:45: quarter to 5
    4:45: 3 quarters 5
    4:50: ten to 5
    5:00: "full"

I'm sure I missed some from parts of Germany I've never lived in/been to.

Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um". Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not important or implied by context, which you can't do if you just say the numbers.

EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".

davedx• 5 years ago

Dutch is my second language, my kids are Dutch, but they still sometimes struggle with the time.

"Tien voor half vijf" (ten before half five) is indeed 4:20.

"Tien over half vijf" (ten after half five) is 4:40.

Then when it's 4:45, it's "kwart voor vijf" (quarter before five).

I always have to think about it before I say it.

thaumasiotes9• 5 years ago

(sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.

German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen".

Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.

logifail• 5 years ago

German here... I hate how we say numbers

We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa).

Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."

umpalumpaaa• 5 years ago

But isn’t using the “zwanzigeins” notation prone to error as well?

Zwanzigeins could mean 20 1 or 21. The only thing that differentiates “20 1” from “21” is the duration of the delay between 20 and 1…

DonaldFisk3• 5 years ago

There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote out numbers the same was German does.

The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.

Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...

Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...

Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...

What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find:

"About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."

hulitu• 5 years ago

German is an LSB language.

DonaldFisk3• 5 years ago

There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German.

I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g.

    Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ...

    Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ...

    Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ...

What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find:

    About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."

    ‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.

chabad360• 5 years ago

IIRC, the original Hebrew also writes most numbers this way.

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

Beat me to the blackbirds, but could it have a French source?

I guess America didn’t go with “Seven and four score years ago...” though

FearNotDaniel• 5 years ago

I was at school in the north of England (Yorkshire) in the late 1970s/early 80s and there were a few schoolteachers, and some old folks, who still spoke this way.

ajmurmann• 5 years ago

Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still traumatized growing up with this problem.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I very much prefer English, it is much more logical

First time I ever heard someone say that about English!

stefandesu• 5 years ago

Opened this thread to say exactly this. It wasn't a problem for me before I started using English regularly, but in the past few years, I've been getting German numbers wrong more and more often. It's just so confusing and I have to consciously think about it every time.

Bud3• 5 years ago

As the comments point out, our counting system in English does precisely the same sort of thing, often: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, etc., all name the ones digit before the tens. And because of logic and ease of counting relatively small numbers of things. You can tell this is the reason since, once you get over 20, all this reverses: twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, etc.

It's the same pattern in French. Under 20: douze, treize, quatorze, quinze. Over 20: vingt et un, vingt-deux, vingt-trois, vingt-quatre, etc.

gpderetta• 5 years ago

For some reason Italian flips at 17: sedici (16, six-ten), diciassette (17, ten-seven).

cameronh90• 5 years ago

I think many English speakers would admit 11 through 19 are a bit of a weird case. It would probably make more sense if we went ten, oney-one, oney-two, etc. I imagine most English people subconsciously treat 13-19 as individually named as 0-12 are, rather than comprehending them as a composition of two numbers as 20-99 are.

That said, based on the other commenters here, the mixed endian nature of German counting seems very strange to me, being able to generally read numbers the same way they're serialised on paper seems useful.

dredmorbius3• 5 years ago

So do eleven ("one left over") and twelve ("two left"), with a bit of stretch.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/eleven

https://www.etymonline.com/word/twelve

ginko2• 5 years ago

Interestingly Norwegian used to spell out numbers in the same order as German, but reformed this in the 1950s when telephone numbers became widespread:

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_nye_tellem%C3%A5ten

I guess having a dedicated Språkrådet to oversee the development of the Norwegian language and a single broadcasting service(NRK) made the roll-out of this possible.

davidkunz4• 5 years ago

Reminds me of an episode of "King of Queens" when Arthur dictates a phone number: https://youtu.be/e_B40_WXDoQ

In German, it's even funnier because of the 'wrong order': https://youtu.be/gjPmUUCdLHw (hats off to the translators!)

xlance• 5 years ago

There are still plenty of people using the old way, young and old.

I would say I use the old way in all situations except when I read out phonenumbers.

j7ake• 5 years ago

Historically english also spoke numbers in the same way as in German. For example “four and twenty blackbirds”.

dfawcus• 5 years ago

As in the nursery rhyme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence

That form of counting is still understood, recognised, but viewed as archaic in England.

I guess it got lost in the evolution of Old English to Middle English, and the interplay of Old Norse plus the subsequent influence of Norman French, all of which bashed the Germanic core of of English in to its modern form.

filmor• 5 years ago

Numbers in multiple Sherlock Holmes books are spelled out this way, so that switch must have happened much more recently.

Taniwha2• 5 years ago

Back when the Spanish had driven the Moors south monks were picking over the wonderful libraries they had left behind, one of the treasures they discovered was what we now call arabic numbers - but they screwed up, they took the numbers as they saw them whole into their writing system. They took numbers meant to be written in a right to left writing system into a left to right system without reversing them.

Writing numbers smallest digits first is particularly useful in business - when you add numbers together the result can be written in order, you don't have to guess and leave enough space for the answer to fit into.

But it's also screwed us over down the generations - it's the cause for our computers' big-endian vs. little-endian sillyness - took us a generation and we finally have decided that, well, the original arabic way of doing it was right

jefftk2• 5 years ago

On the other hand, network byte order is big endian, so now we typically have a little endian devices converting to and from big endian to talk to each other.

Taniwha2• 5 years ago

Yes, we're stuck with that, at least for old protocols

Zak• 5 years ago

Counterpoint: when talking or skimming text, the exact number is often not especially important to most of the audience, but the most significant digit or two are.

If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.

geoduck142• 5 years ago

If there are 123 new covid cases in the cycling club, I'm not going to the meeting; it's not because of the 3 or the 20.

Are you skipping because bicycles are SUPER popular during the pandemic and you don't want to fit into the crowd?

nailuj• 5 years ago

To know the magnitude of the most significant digit, you have to scan the whole number anyways. Looking for this info at the end of the number would be just as natural if you were used to it.

pezezin4• 5 years ago

I'm no historian, but that explanation doesn't make sense to me, for two reasons:

* Pre-decimal numeral systems in use at that time (Roman/Greek/whatever numerals) were already written biggest-left to smallest-right, and had been so for more than a thousand years. * Arabic numerals were invented in India, and Indian languages are written left-to-right.

tux1968• 5 years ago

I know it's an irrational pet peeve, but i'd be happy if the German's (and others) would just stop using comma as decimal point.

raverbashing2• 5 years ago

To me is a bit weird, since I learned it that way.

But the dot as decimal point also makes sense.

Now, using comma as a thousands separator? Nuh-huh. Doesn't make any sense to me

2'000? Fine. 2_000? Fine. 2,000? It's just awful

beefield• 5 years ago

I'd be happy to compromise so that Europeans ban decimal comma and Americans start using metric system.

dan-robertson5• 5 years ago

At the international meridian conference of 1884, the French allowed the resolution for using the Greenwich meridian[1] to go through on the condition that another resolution promoting the use of the metric (or ‘decimal’) system (including decimal time!) also went through.

[1] or as the French called it, “Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds”

raverbashing2• 5 years ago

Yes, it's a bit naive to ask "why they were initially conceived backwards"

But why it remains as such is just anachronistic ;) English inverted them back, so it is consistent with the rest of the > 100 numbers. (ok, the 0-20 range has exceptions in many languages, so it's fine)

qayxc2• 5 years ago

(ok, the 0-20 range has exceptions in many languages, so it's fine)

(ok, the 0-99 has exceptions in many languages, so it's fine)

laurensr• 5 years ago

It's the same in Dutch... But French is even weirder : 96 becomes four-twenty sixteen...

3np• 5 years ago

Danish is the worst.. “six half-fives” (6 + (5 - 1/2)*20)

rvense3• 5 years ago

This is just the etymology. These words are just words, both in Danish and French. It's not like speakers of that language do the maths before saying it.

woutr_be2• 5 years ago

My native language is Dutch, but I've been living in an English speaking country for almost 10 years now. It's annoying to having to change my mindset whenever I visit friends and family in my native country.

In Belgium, we say 25 as "five and twenty" (same as German), which makes sense, but if you've been saying "twenty-five" for 10 years, it does throw you off.

WJW• 5 years ago

Not to mention that "half five" means 17:30 in most English speaking countries but 16:30 in Dutch.

jefftk2• 5 years ago

In the US, I don't think most people would know what to make of "half five".

(I bet something like 20% of people would think hard and then decide you meant 2:30)

BruceEel2• 5 years ago

and let's not forget our masterpiece "ten to half five", one of the most straightforwardly intuitive ways of saying "16:20"...

woutr_be2• 5 years ago

I have noticed that I somewhat simplified my vocabulary in that regard, previously I would say "half five", but now I just go with "four thirty".

Delk• 5 years ago

I've personally opted to never use the expression "half five" in English because it seems able to cause any amount of confusion and misunderstanding among people from different linguistic backgrounds.

kwhitefoot• 5 years ago

I's ambiguous in British English, at least it used to be. Half five can be short for either half of five (4:30) or half past five (5:30).

mudita• 5 years ago

In some dialects of German they go even further, using “quarter five” for “16:15” and “three quarter five” for “16:45”.

TulliusCicero3• 5 years ago

I’m American and I wouldn’t know what to make of “half five” in English (I speak some German and it’s the same as Dutch there). To say 17:30 you’d say “half past five”.

BruceEel2• 5 years ago

Netherlands calling. Same problem over here. Perhaps I would find inversion a little bit less annoying if it were at least applied consistently but no "123" = "one-hundred-three-and-twenty"!

gizdan• 5 years ago

My parents emigrated to the Netherlands when I was young. In my native tongue we say numbers in the same way as they do in English. My 8 year-old brain struggled to understand this new way saying numbers when I started school in the Netherlands. I got there in the end but I recall it feeling like it took forever.

ezconnect• 5 years ago

It's not weird, the problem is you learned to communicate in English and learned another way of vocalizing numbers.

arendtio2• 5 years ago

Given that in English, as well as in German, contrary to the roman letters, the numbers are arabic signs, I wonder in which direction arabs spell their numbers.

Does anybody know?

ahmedfromtunis2• 5 years ago

It's confusing.

For everyday usage we use a mix of the two; thus, 1998 is read as "a thousand and nine hundred and eight and ninety". So:

1998 >><<

But according to the traditional way (you hear it used in the news for example), it's read as "eight and ninety and nine hundred and a thousand". So:

1998 <<<<

However, this is so rare that many of the younger native Arabic speakers aren't even aware of it.

dan-robertson5• 5 years ago

So in written Arabic, the digits go from least significant to most significant which means a number looks the same when written least-significant first right-to-left as it does in e.g. written English, most-significant first left-to-right.

arendtio2• 5 years ago

Isn't arabic in general written and read from right-to-left? That way the traditional way seems very consistent.

dredmorbius3• 5 years ago

If you think about it, arabic numerals are a right-to-left script.

2,021: one and twenty and two thousand.

geraneum• 5 years ago

Interestingly, I have a German girlfriend who, when speaks English, sometimes reads numbers backwards mistakenly. For example, she reads 73, thirty-seven before quickly fixing it.

barosl• 5 years ago

After reading the answer, I've got some questions:

1. I like little-endian systems because adding or subtracting small numbers is easier in those systems byte-wise. Would the same benefit apply to human languages?

2. Why did the Arabic numeral system choose big-endian in the first place? It could easily have been little-endian, even including zeroes, likes 001 meaning one hundred. Who made the choice?

sdefresne2• 5 years ago

Arabic is written left to right, so aren't the number little-endian in their Arabic form ?

majewsky2• 5 years ago

I was going to correct your mistake, but then I understood that you just wrote "right to left" right-to-left.

Koshkin3• 5 years ago

Not sure about Arabic, but in Hebrew numbers are written from left to right.

amelius• 5 years ago

I prefer big-endian systems because you more quickly get an idea about the magnitude of a number as the bits come in.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

It is because little endian-ness in speech allowed market makers to trade faster. If you have a commodity that's trading at around 24 or 25, there's no point in waiting to hear about the 20, you just care about the 4 or the 5. This allowed the HFTs of the old world to trade super fast and the rest of society adopted it as a result.

Just kidding.

Number systems in different languages get pretty weird. I still have people asking my why in Danish, 50 (halvtreds), 70 (halvfjerds), and 90 (halvfems) seem to have the word "half" in them, and it's half of 60 (tres) or 80 (firs) but not 100. The reason is the number system in the top half of the hundreds actually counts in 20s (snes) but that old word is basically never used anymore. So 70 is half a 20 to having four 20s, which got shortened (fire snes -> firs). Similarly 90 is half of a snes towards 5 20s, which we prefer to call a hundred.

There is some hope though. Swedish and Norwegian are reformed, despite also being closely related to German.

I did read a popsci piece about the effect on numbers on kids learning times tables. Chinese numbering seems much more sensible. 15 is just ten-five, 52 is just five-ten-two (Vietnamese as well). In that way perhaps it directly encodes the place value system that kids need to learn, whereas naming it "two and half of the score on the way to the third" is just confusing. Personally I sometimes do times tables in Cantonese, it seems to recall a lot faster than doing it in English and certainly Danish. If you think about it, the ten in the middle is just a constant, so you are only remembering two sounds. Also there's no converting between the tens version of the number (fifty) and five. The whole table is just combinations of the basic 1-9, with nothing in the units if it's divisible by 10.

jeroenhd8• 5 years ago

The Danish case (at least for 50) was explained by Tom Scott in a numberphile video, I believe. https://youtu.be/l4bmZ1gRqCc starting around the two minute mark.

The half in the Danish 50 is derived from an abbreviation of an abbreviation, originating from "half away from three, times twenty" ((3-½)20 = 2½20 = 50) using some nice, outdated numbering orders. He doesn't talk about 70 and 90, but your explanation makes sense. That would mean there are two ways the "half" made it into the names for tens!

lr19702• 5 years ago

It is worse than "backwards". It is mostly forwards except for the special case of the second digit that is transposed with the first digit. For example, 123 becomes "one-hundred-three-and-twenty". It was driving me nuts for ages.

dan-robertson5• 5 years ago

I was a bit unsatisfied by the top answer which mostly seemed to be a reaction to the connotations of the word ‘backwards’ rather than a discussion of the history which was tacked on at the end.

I think the answer is that languages didn’t traditionally have base-10 systems of counting words (e.g. in English you see things based on scores with irregular number names below 20 persisting, and you see systems based on the dozen and gross, and money and measuring had other counting systems). When Hindu-Arabic numerals arrived (via Fibonacci et al) and were adopted, languages adapted more towards base-10 systems to match the written numbers, and English ended up with a regular left-to-right system for numbers above 19 and German ended up with irregularities up to, I think, 99 (French and Dutch also have weird systems up to 99 I think). So the fundamental point is that the reason number systems are so similar (and therefore the reason this seemed like a sensible[1] question) is that they were redeveloped based on the new arithmetic system and people don’t really notice the vestiges of the old systems much.

[1] I don’t want to say that the question is bad but rather that without the historical context it seems like a question more specific to German than something like “why do adjectives come before the noun in English and after it in French” which ends up with an answer that is roughly general history plus “that’s just how it happened”.

DFHippie• 5 years ago

I personally liked the reply further down the stack that said the German order is more useful in context of counting. You put the digit that changes with every count first and the one that stays the same for a while second (or mention it only when it changes). Because you don't typical count methodically like this if the number of things counted is large, this system only obtains for two-digit numbers. This is just a hypothesis, but I thought it was the most interesting answer.

thefifthsetpin• 5 years ago

I do the same thing in English, especially when counting to estimate time. I'm not thinking "twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two" I'm thinking "twenty, -one, -two'.

I think I prefer English's ordering for that. When I say "twenty, -one," it sounds like twenty-one, but as it's the twenty-first item that's not terribly confusing. Were it "neun-, zwanzig" it sounds a bit more like "neunundzwanzig."

I suppose that problem just moves to English if you're counting down, though. shrug

ilaksh• 5 years ago

It wouldn't be a Stack Exchange site if the question and asker were not insulted.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

"Closed as too stupid, you bloody idiot."

juped• 5 years ago

All the top answers are similarly awful, just smug bleating and ignoring the question. If someone doesn't know the etymological history, they shouldn't say anything!

TrackerFF2• 5 years ago

Used to be like that in Norway. Some older people will still say "two-and-forty", "eight-and-seventy", instead of "forty-two", "seventy-eight", etc.

In 1950, the gov. decided that it was time to standardize things - and the catalysator for this was actually the phone switching centrals/boards, that argued having one standard method would decrease errors in the manual patching. Remember, back in the day you had human operators that would operate the switching boards.

This change was called "The new counting method", and describes how numbers between 20 and 100 are counted/pronounced.

qayxc2• 5 years ago

Sound a bit inconsistent - why weren't 10 - 20 also changed? Would have been great to have a language that's consistent all the way through as far as counting is concerned :)

TrackerFF2• 5 years ago

I have nowhere enough knowledge in linguistics to properly explain this, but numbers between 10 and 20 have their own unique pronouncement which sound quite incorrect if inverted. Not too different from English, 10,11,12 have their own endings, while 13 to 19 end with a "ten" - similar to the English "teen". But saying "three-and-ten","four-and-ten" etc. doesn't sound right at all, in our language.

It's after this that you get "twenty-one, twenty-two, ... " and up to "ninety-nine" - which can also be pronounced "one-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, ..." up to "nine-and-ninety".

oldsecondhand• 5 years ago

Fun fact: Hungarian doesn't have special names for the numbers 11-19.

masteruvpuppetz2• 5 years ago

Arabic same as German. Urdu takes gold. Every number from 1 to 100 has a different name

pritambaral2• 5 years ago

Urdu takes gold. Every number from 1 to 100 has a different name

Urdu/Hindi numbers (20-99) are mostly small-digit–big-digit combos, with special combination rules. One doesn't really have to remember eighty different numbers because of the rules. Plus, the distinction between how single-digit numerals are pronounced and how these combined digits are pronounced helps avoid confusion regarding order of the digits.

masteruvpuppetz2• 5 years ago

Well I somewhat disagree. The big number small number combination is not trivial to remember. Sometimes many of them don't even have any relation to previous numbers. Even to this day 40yrs on, I have to think hard before uttering any number. Eg: try remembering Unasi (79) and navasi (89), sarsath (67), etc.

willyt• 5 years ago

“Four and twenty blackbirds baked in pie” is a line from English nursery rhyme. Also two score and ten meaning 50 is not that old. At some point fairly recently English must have changed to the current system. Until the 1960’s there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a British pound sterling (240 pence).

timthorn• 5 years ago

My grandmother would often use that form of words in regular speech.

kevinwang• 5 years ago

Yeah, I'm reading Pride and Prejudice right now (1813) and in dialogue they speak numbers "backwards" like that.

dustintrex• 5 years ago

Australia's largest meat pie company is named after this. Although I doubt most people realize it actually means "24".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four%27n_Twenty

layer8• 5 years ago

It may have to do with the fact that, in German, by default the first syllable of a word is stressed, and in two-digit numbers the least significant digit is actually the more distinctive one in ordinary usage (in terms of wanting to express an exact number). Note how in English, the stress is usually on the least significant digit as well ("twenty-three").

frankfrankfrank5• 5 years ago

If you think German numbers are strange … don't even look at French that require multiplication and addition. Four-twenty-ten-seven? … yup, you guessed it 97.

nanis• 5 years ago

https://jose-lesson.com/lin/2017/01/16/nonaginta-septem/

rvense3• 5 years ago

That's just the etymology. It's a word. French speakers aren't multiplying in their heads...

t8e56vd4ih• 5 years ago

confuses me a lot. I'm German but tend to speak numbers in English in my mind when writing them down.

also impressive is the number of cases:

eins eine einer ein einem einen eines

probably forgot a few

throwawaybutwhy• 5 years ago

Yan tyan tethera methera pimp... dick... bumfit... giggot.

Which is to say, who are we to judge German numbers when there are weirder ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbric#Counting_systems

ggrrhh_ta• 5 years ago

I am sure it has been said, but it is not any more backwards than "thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen" -> three and ten, four and ten, five and ten...

In fact, in German it keeps being consistent, while in English and other languages you change the direction after 20... quite arbitrarily...

When you speak German they as backwards to you, as thirteen is to you when you speak English... Not backwards at all...

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

And then there is eleven and twelve... Like not even consistency inside one decade... We in Finland have decency two say "one-second ... nine-second"

vnorilo• 5 years ago

Yes, we say "yksitoista" (one of second), "kaksitoista (two of second) and so on until twenty, where we revert to "kaksikymmentäyksi" (two tens and one; ten in actual plural). But in some old books from the early 20th century, the reversal goes on beyond 20: "kaksikolmatta" (two of third) for 22 and so on. I do not know how that archaic usage deals with 100+.

submeta• 5 years ago

Turkish seems to be the most systematic than:

11 => On Bir (Ten One)

12 => On iki (Ten two)

…

21 => Yirmi bir (Twenty One)

Etc

abdusco• 5 years ago

Yet, the names of tens don't seem to follow any logic:

10: on (no connection to 1: bir)

20: yirmi (no connection to 2: iki)

30: otuz (no connection to 3: üç)

40: kırk (no connection to 4: dört)

50: elli (no connection to 5: beş)

60: altmış (sounds like 6: altı)

70: yetmiş (sounds like 7: yedi)

80: seksen (sounds like 8: sekiz)

90: doksan (sounds like 9: dokuz)

To this day, I can't figure out how "yedi" becomes "yetmiş", or whether they're related at all. Are they borrowed from Farsi?

rvense3• 5 years ago

No, Persian has words that are vaguely derived from the basic numerals.

egeozcan2• 5 years ago

It comes from Chuvash language. İnş forms counting numbers, and language researches think they used to count in tens, as they didn't need precise numbers.

yedi/seven (m) inş -> yētiminş -> yetmiş/seventy

altı/six (m) inş -> altıminş -> altmış/sixty. see: https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=altm%C4%B1%C5%9F (in Turkish)

90 is tokuz-on (dokuz-on, nine-ten), 80 is formed that way too.

40, 30, 20 have specific names in old Turkish. Which means they used those numbers a lot, but no evidence why. No connection to 4, 3, 2 whatsoever (old Turkish for 4 ist tört, for example).

50 (elli) comes from the same root as the word which means hand (el). You can perhaps guess why.

Long story short: You just need to memorize them if you are speaking Modern Turkish because "historical reasons". Turks started using numbers a bit too early and early weirdness was never fully "corrected" :)

What I like in Turkish is that you don't use the unnecessary "one" before hundred/thousand. 100 -> yüz, 200 -> iki yüz. you don't say "bir yüz" for 100, just "yüz".

wycy• 5 years ago

German numbers are basically written as:

10ⁿ 10ⁿ⁻¹ … 10⁴ 10³ 10² 10⁰ 10¹

Descending powers of 10 then the old switcheroo at the end.

hibbelig• 5 years ago

The switcheroo happens in every three-digit group: When you read the number 123,123,123 out loud, you say "drei(3)-und-zwanzig(20)" three times. (I've used comma as the thousand separator here.)

Archelaos• 5 years ago

I am wondering why the English have it only backwards for the numbers 13 to 19.

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

The answer goes through great lengths explaining why it’s just historical and everyone did it so it’s not backwards. That sounds backwards to me.

Pxtl• 5 years ago

Now I'm curious, are there any cultures on earth that are fully little-endian? I know RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic put the least-sig-digit on the right and are therefore read as little-endian, but afaik when they read them aloud they follow the Germanic approach of "Three hundreds and four and twenty", not starting from the least-sig-digit.

Also, Unicode does this crazy thing where it switches typing direction to LTR when you start Latin numerals even if you're in an RTL language, I think. I worked on an i18n project and the behavior of Unicode with RTL languages confused the hell out of me.

Adverblessly2• 5 years ago

Byblical Hebrew has numbers in "two and twenty" format (including things like "fifty and hundred"), but in modern Hebrew they are pronounced similarly to English, including special exceptions for 11-19 and using Million->Billion (Milliard allowed as well)->Trillion rather than Million->Milliard->Billion->Billiard; And not including the "thirty five hundred" oddity, in Hebrew that's "Three thousands five hundred".

otagekki2• 5 years ago

Be happy it's only backwards from 10 to 99.

Have you checked Malagasy? We read the numbers totally backwards although we've switched to the Latin alphabet like 200 years ago... It's sometimes so inconvenient for everyday life, especially for large amounts, that we end up counting in _French_ instead. For numbers 11 to 99, we also use casual abbreviations like (I translated) "one with two" for 21; or "seven with three" for 37, but reading large numbers from 10,000 upwards (mostly Malagasy currency) with the left-to-right writing system is tedious.

kello• 5 years ago

If you think about it we say numbers "backwards" in english in the teens: "four-teen, fif-teen, six-teen" and so on.

emsy• 5 years ago

The question, why German numbers are "backwards" is naive in many ways.

What a terrible way to start an answer.

Havoc• 5 years ago

To make my school life miserable. We switched language of instruction for maths and science between them at various grades

ed25519FUUU• 5 years ago

“Why are numbers “backwards”?? What a naive question! So ignorant! What’s backwards to you is forwards to somebody else! Anyway, when Germans studied numerals they decided to write them backwards in keeping with their written text”

freeflight• 5 years ago

Tbh, as a German I never really noticed this.

Thinking it trough, it also makes me wonder why it ain't consistent and breaks down after more than two digits? 21 is einundzwangig, but 121 is einhunderteinundzwanzig, 1121 is eintausendeinhunderteinundzwanzig, and so on. So there it's not really backwards anymore.

TulliusCicero3• 5 years ago

But once you’re at tens of thousands, it rears its ugly head again, einundzwanzigtausend.

globular-toast• 5 years ago

It's quite important for programmers especially to decouple the idea of numbers from the notation and representation of numbers. Start with Knuth, chapter four. There is only one integer that we call "one", but there are infinitely many names for it: "un", "ein" etc. You could even make up your own name if you like. There is no right or wrong way to say or write numbers, there are just more or less convenient ways, depending on the application.

When it comes to natural language, the answer to "why is X the way it is?" is always ultimately the same: because it works. It is sometimes interesting to learn that this word came from that root and so on, but ultimately we're just making sounds with our throats and mouths that go into other people's ears. Everyone around the world is talking about the same stuff, there are just so many ways to say it we often settled on different ones.

cookiengineer• 5 years ago

Actually, this is a modern thing. In the old German language (pre-1800) the numbers were spelled in the correct order in the areas where Hochdeutsch was spoken, with the single digit being at the end.

Also some early books from the era directly after the 30 jaehrige Krieg still use the different way of spelling numbers (e.g. from Eva Hartner comes to mind).

Einhundert-Zwanzig-und-Eins is still a number everybody understands, and it is also accepted in written form on bank transfer checks.

So I'd say just go ahead and use it this way :) the more people use this way of spelling numbers, the more likely it is that the language will adapt and change (back).

masswerk• 5 years ago

Here's a guess: It could be because of an emphasis on counting. Meaning, when counting, the significant, changing part of the numbers is the least significant figure, while the higher portions (potencies of the numeric system) become soon redundant. There seem to be a cultural differences in languages regarding the range in which this seems to matter: while it's just the tens in English, this is the entire range up to 100 in German. However, even in German this counting range ends at 100 at which point we're probably dealing with numbers that had been accumulated previously.

globalise832• 5 years ago

I find that in German you often have to wait for the end of a complete sentence, often including a couple of subordinate clauses, to have a clue what is going on. Let's just say that backwards numbers are the least of my problems living in Bavaria.

Someone2• 5 years ago

The German word for that is Bandwurmsatz (“tapeworm sentence”, because it goes on and on and on). Native speakers likely have a higher threshold for calling a sentence that than foreigners.

globalise832• 5 years ago

Great word. Will go into my lexicon along with Sitzfleisch, Pimperlgsund and other gems I have picked up along the way.

kriro• 5 years ago

I find it more curious that the languages I know best tend to have special words for 11 and 12 that don't follow the same logic as the rest. Eleven and twelve instead of one-teen, two-teen or something. And that even leads to things like a teenager being age 13+. In German it's the same elf + zwölf and then it continues with dreizehn, vierzehn etc. My guess is that it is somehow related to the fact that a dozen is a thing but I'm curious where it comes from. In French it goes all the way up to 16 (onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize) before we end up with dix-sept for 17. French has always been the most peculiar to me as there's stuff like 82 being quatre-vingt-deux (4*20+12). And then there's languages like Vietnamese that happily start with 10+1 from the get go (mười một, mười hai, mười ba). Fascinating stuff :)

sva_• 5 years ago

I was curious and found this rationalisation: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76007/why-it-eleven-twel...

It's pretty hand-wavey but still interesting speculation.

nkurz• 5 years ago

I was mystified by the parenthetical in one of the answers: (Please note that "hundred" once meant 120.)

Seemed unlikely, apparently the ground truth has moved more through the ages than I expected. Lo, the "long hundred": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_hundred.

jacquesm3• 5 years ago

Try French... 95? Quatre vingt quinze. That's four times twenty fifteen.

German at least makes some kind of sense.

kingcharles• 5 years ago

Another confusing scenario to me is that Arabs who invented the numbering system write the digits left-to-right in a right-to-left writing system:

رقم هاتف والدتي هو 8765309

It won't let me paste vertical Japanese text or I would demonstrate that monstrosity too.

febstar• 5 years ago

Most likely because Arabs did not invent the numbering system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370553

egeozcan2• 5 years ago

Yeah let's not do original research in HN. This can have millions of reasons.

optimusprinceps• 5 years ago

This is not unique to German. In Urdu, numbers higher than 20 are pronounced: 1-2 for 21 (aik-ees), 5-4 for 45 etc.

danans• 5 years ago

There are many more languages that speak or read (some of) their numbers "backwards", among them Greek, Latin (both directions possible), Celtic languages etc., and of course languages that actually read right to left like Arabic, where our written numbers come from

Ironically, in Arabic numbers are written left to right, just like in the west, reflecting that they were borrowed from India, whose indigenous writing systems are also ltr. It goes to show that not only is there not a "correct" order to express numbers, but the spoken order need not reflect the written order.

xaedes• 5 years ago

I often see a similar problem in code that deals with coordinate system transformations. But there is a simple solution! It boils down to properly naming your variables.

When using transformation matrices to transform from one coordinate system "In" into another coordinate system "Out" you have two options to name the matrix: M_{In,Out} or M_{Out,In}, which can be read as "In to Out" and "Out from In". Unfortunately what I often see is the first notation. It looks simpler at first, but it is actually backwards, similar to how the german numbers are backwards.

When you chain the transformations you get this weird forth and back:

M_{A to C} = M_{B to C} * M_{A to B}

M_{A,C} = M_{B,C} * M_{A,B}

Compare that to the (not backward) alternative:

M_{C from A} = M_{C from B} * M_{B from A}

M_{C,A} = M_{C,B} * M_{B,A}

Note how the Bs line up, C is the most left in both sides of the equation and A is on the right. When you transform a vector from coordinate system A to, lets say C, it looks like this: "vec_C = M_{C,A} * vec_A". Everything lines up and is in the natural order the transformations are taking place in. Compared to this, the backward notation is really confusing.

I see people make mistakes when dealing with transformation chains all the time because they use this weird M_{From,To} notation, or worse, no notation involving the coordinate systems at all.

Like take this example: "M = M1 * inv(M3) * M2", what does that even mean. Find names for the involved coordinate systems and name the transformations accordingly. That could be: M1 transforms to A from B, M3 is C_B, M2 is C_D. Then M is A_D:

B_C = inv(C_B)

A_D = A_B * B_C * C_D

cryptica2• 5 years ago

It's only backwards for the last 2-digit numbers. Once you go into the hundreds and beyond, it's read from left to right. I think most Germans probably don't even realize it. They just recall all 2-digit numbers from memory.

In French, to an outsider, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (99) literally sounds like 4 * 20 + 10 + 9... But most french people will think of 'quatre-vingt-dix' as a single word (90) not thinking of quatre (4), vingt (20) and dix (10) as 3 different words. This is especially true because a lot of French words and names have a hyphen in them so French people see the hyphen more as an integral part of the word rather than a separator.

TulliusCicero3• 5 years ago

It's only backwards for the last 2-digit numbers. Once you go into the hundreds and beyond, it's read from left to right.

Well, no, because “twenty three thousand” will be “three and twenty thousand”. Ditto for millions.

cryptica2• 5 years ago

I guess my knowledge of German is still too basic. I know in the hundreds it goes left to right so I assumed that it would continue until infinity. That is extremely confusing.

French and English are very simple and consistent by comparison; you just need to memorize the first 10 to 20 numbers, every 10th number from 0 until 100, every thousandth number from 0 until infinity (or however high you want to know). All the other numbers can be derived using the same simple rules.

jlg23• 5 years ago

As a German who nowadays speaks French most of the time, I long for my simple German numbers...

99 in French is quatre-vingt-dix-huit (four-twenty ten-eight)

MikeCapone• 5 years ago

Not that it matters too much, but what you speller out is 98, not 99

ineedasername• 5 years ago

Big-endian vs. little endian.

In general, languages differ in syntactic structure on the level of word order. For example, in Latin, word order a bit free form, things could be moved around quite a bit and still make sense to the listener. Probably allowed for some interesting creativity and poetics.

In English, I would say about a book, "the book on the table". In another language, it may be "the on-the-table book."

There's even a slight semantic difference where the later example somewhat directly gives the book the property of being "on-the-table". IIRC from my school days, that example resembles Japanese construction, but please someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a long time since my comp ling course work.

umanwizard3• 5 years ago

German numbers are actually mixed-endian when they get to three digits and above. “136” is “one-hundred six-and-thirty”.

mro_name3• 5 years ago

Arabic/indian numbers, when written in arab writing direction from right (lowest significant decimal) to left (most significant) can just be read logically without scanning ahead but in order small to big.

Maybe german borrowed this RTL reading order for the 2-digit numbers.

German borrowed the word 'Ziffer' (= 'digit') from the arab word for 'zero', so there's some connections.

hbarka• 5 years ago

Taken to its extreme, numbers would be orally expressed in binary digits or pick your base-n!

dctaflin• 5 years ago

Fascinating. I studied Finnish for three years and it never occurred to me that the numbers 8 and 9 (kahdeksan and yhdeksan) mean 2-from-10 and 1-from-10. Though 10 isn't "deksan", it's "kymmenen". Still the "yh" and "kah" should have been clearly seen as akin to "yksi" and "kaksi" (one and two).

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

I think modern theory is that stem is something like "-eksa" meaning without. And link to indoeuropean ten is just coincidence. Likely more believable to me looking at rest of the small numbers, which are pretty local.

simonblack• 5 years ago

NO language is free from long-standing sources of annoyance.

If you doubt that, look at inconsistencies in English verb tenses, or pronunciations in French, or (English again) the spelling or words. Or even the myriad of alphabets out there.

rover0• 5 years ago

Why is it thirteen instead of ten-three?

Because lanuages are illogical, with lots of historic baggage.

anonu• 5 years ago

In one of the stack responses they say:

and this is also done in modern spoken Arabic with no strange reversals as in German

That is not fully correct. Arabic numbers are spoken in a similar way to German. For example, 42 is "2 and 40" (إثنان و أربعون in fus7a)

It is somewhat natural to read a number like that in Arabic. As you are reading right-to-left you come across a number where the least significant digit comes first.

In other words in English if you see 123 you think "one hundred twenty three" as you read left-to-right. That same number is written ١٢٣ (the 3 least significant digit is to far right) and is read "one hundred and three and twenty".

rg111• 5 years ago

Not necessarily only in German. A lot of Indian languages also say number in this way.

In Bengali, we don't use full words for the 1's place, but a derivative of the root.

31- ektrish- ek (eka- 1) trish (30) 32- batrish- ba 33- tetrish- te (tin) 34- choutrish- chou (char) 35- pointrish- poin (panch)

and so on.

Now that I mention this, I also remember that Sanskrit words for number are like this, as well-

35- panchatringshati (pancha- 5, tringshati- 30)

Why are German numbers backwards?

Related Stories