• Nangijala@feddit.dk
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    1 day ago

    That meme is so lame. 92 in Danish is two and a half fives. The 20 part is old-fashioned and literally nobody has used that since the 1800s.

    2 and a half fives’ twentieth = outdated cringe. 2 and a half fives = actually how it is said today.

    It’s still a friggin nightmare to get someone’s Phone number verbally, though.

      • Nangijala@feddit.dk
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        19 hours ago

        More like 2 and half fives. Half five is our word for 90. So in essence we say 2 and 90 but the word 90 is half five.

        80 is fours

        70 is half fours

        60 is threes

        50 is half threes

        40 is forty

        30 is thirty

        20 is twenty

        10 is ten.

        Oh and a 100 is a hundred. So I dunno what happened between 50 and 90, but I’m sure there is a funny story behind that somewhere.

        • JacksonLamb@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          More like 2 and half fives.

          Even worse! That would be an indeterminate number that starts at 7 and goes up by 2.5 increments depending on how many half fives there are (since in this version it’s not specified, but has to be more than one).

          7, 9.5, 12, 14.5…

          I love this. I thought English had some crazy aspects but this is next level.

    • petersr@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      Dane here. No one actively thinks of 90 (halvfems, 2 and a half fives) as a mathematical expression. Is is just a word for 90. So we say 2+90 like Germany.

      Would it have been nice if that word meant “9 tens”, yes, but Danish is a just a stupid language where you have to learn a bunch of things by heart unfortunately.

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        How would you say trump is like Hitler? Do you have to describe the Holocaust in few words within a long ass German style word?

        • bstix@feddit.dk
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          23 hours ago

          Easy. We often use idioms for comparisons.

          One old way would be: “Trump and Hitler are both 2/3 yards from one piece” which means “They’re cut from the same (bad) fabric”.

          Fabric was cut in an old measurement"alen" which was 2 foot or 2/3 yards, so simply stating the length would be understood as fabric, similar to how everyone knows that a 2x4s is a piece of wood and such.

      • GoosLife@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        No, in Danish the “half five” part means the same as “half past 4” on the clock: 4.5.

        Then the part that most people omit nowadays, sindstyvende, means times 20.

        (Half past 4) times 20 = 90.

        • Nangijala@feddit.dk
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          23 hours ago

          When you have to write down numbers, but the person reading you the numbers speaks slowly 💀

          Them: “Two…”

          Me: “2”

          Them: “… and fifty”

          Me: “… 2 - 52”

          Them: “Six…”

          Me: “6”

          Them: “… and twenty.”

          Me: “6 - 26”

          🫠