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From: mikulska@comet.Princeton.EDU (Margaret Mikulska)
Subject: Re: Danish Numbers (was: Linguistics for Kids)
Message-ID: <1995Mar22.031215.29515@Princeton.EDU>
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Reply-To: mikulska@astro.princeton.edu (Margaret Mikulska)
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References: <241561598.33328314@inform-bbs.dk> <D5ItLv.Gu@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 03:12:15 GMT
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In article <D5ItLv.Gu@midway.uchicago.edu> rmk4@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>
>I'm afraid that just like every other attempt I've seen by speakers 
>of Danish to explain their number system, this doesn't work.  The 
>math simply doesn't work.  "half-third" just doesn't get you 2.5, no 
>matter how hard you try.  (at least not logically--more on this later)

It does.  More on this below.

>The problem is that it isn't clear what to do with the occurence
>of "halv" in the form.  If it had its normal meaning, _something_ ought
>to be halved. Well, the only thing you can halve to get 2.5 is 5, and the 
>only thing you can halve to get 50 is one hundred.  Making "half-third"
>equal to 2.5 is the same as making "half-sixty" (half three times 20) 
>equal to 50, so we haven't gotten anywhere.
>
>The immediate response to this by a Danish speaker is to notice that 
>halvtredje "half-third" _is_ the way to say 2.5 in Danish.  So the 
>problem really isn't with 50, 70, and 90 at all.  It's with these
>strange ways that words for 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 are formed.  When somebody
>explains how half-third (or fourth or fifth) can come to mean 2.5 (or 3.5
>or 4.5, respectively), then I'll believe there is some logic to the system.

This is probably quite simple.  First, I'm not sure if this is really 
"third" in Danish (it may be in modern Danish), or an old form of "three" 
which might have been declined.  In some languages numerals have/had 
declensions; obsolete declension forms may mislead modern speakers.
The fact that you can have a 2nd and a 3rd item in a row, but not 
a "2.5-th" item, suggests that we don't have the ordinal "third" here,
but a form of the cardinal "three".

This "half-third", as you translate it, can be probably interpreted as 
"a half is missing (from) three; half taken off three", and that's 2.5. 
(German still uses "halb" in a similar way for time, as in "halb fuenf" 
= 4:30.)

BTW, the same construction used to exist in Polish, e.g.:
"po'ltrzecia" ("l" with a stroke) = "po'l" ("half") + "trzecia" (a word
related to "three/third") and meant 2.5.  Same construction was used for 
3.5, etc.  This is by now completely obsolete to the point that many 
native Polish speakers don't know the exact meaning of the word.  Only 
the word for 1.5 is still used: "po'ltora" (used to be "po'lwtora") = 
"half" + word related to "second/two").

>(note:  I realize that 1/2 times 3 equals 2.5, but we're missing the
>word for "times" and we have a form that means "third," not "three.")

1/2 times 3 = 2.5 ??

-Margaret Mikulska

