[bryanrasmussen]

the Danish is actually a little more complicated

the word for 60 in Danish is tres the word for 50 in Danish is halvtreds - so basically half 60 (I guess cause the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?), and since Danes don't pronounce the d and the halv is quick sometimes you get confused in what is being said.

But then the word for 80 is firs, fee-es with a partially swallowed r sound in there somewhere. and 70 is halvfjerds - half firs.

The word for 90 is halvfems - half fives.

a Dane speaking quickly can confuse others really quickly with these numbers as to whether it was said 50,60,70,80,90 and then you put the second number in 'backwards' as said, so

92 is to og halvfems - toe oh hellfems and so forth, but said very quickly with a tendency to not fully pronounce all of a word.

[BorisJensen]

The system is actually based on scores, 20, which is called a snes in older Danish, so halvtreds is short for halv tredje snes, the half third score, and 60 is tres, short for tre snese, i.e. three scores and so on. So for the tens between 50 and 90, we count scores, and if it's not a whole number of scores, we name it the half of the score that we are into. It's also preserved in a very infrequently used variant word for 80, firsindstyve, which is just 4 score, more explicitly (tyve is the modern word for twenty). In conclusion: Yes, the Danish number system is relatively silly.

[xorcist]

> the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?

No other Nordic language is like that.

It's probably not a coindicence that the same system the French use. Apparently French was the coolest language you could speak in the 1700s and all the nobility did it.

Only the Danish swalllowed the "twenty" part of the it, so it's no longer possible to deduce any meaning from hearing the word. Add that to the fact that "half" has a universally accepted meaning too, but should be understood here as "ten-less-than".

So I think Danish wins the most bizarre counting system over the French. And the French is far more so than the German. All they're guilty of is being careless with the ordering of numerals.

[bryanrasmussen]

>> the original counting system in the Nordic region was based on 20s?

>No other Nordic language is like that.

ok, I was just guessing, hence the question mark.

But I guess Boris Jensen described the reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369172