and i thaught we germans were stupid with our numbers because we say stuff like “zwei und dreißig”/“two and thirty” instead of “dreißig und zwei” or “dreißig-zwei”.
i wonder how stuff like this came to be, it must have been good for something to have stuck around.
There’s this nursery rhyme about “four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” that I can’t remember the rest of. Except that the previous or next verse ended with “rye”.
and i thaught we germans were stupid with our numbers because we say stuff like “zwei und dreißig”/“two and thirty” instead of “dreißig und zwei” or “dreißig-zwei”.
i wonder how stuff like this came to be, it must have been good for something to have stuck around.
Slovenia also uses reversed reading of numbers. 32 is zwei und dreissig in German and we have dvaintrideset (twoandthirty).
Compared to some of the ways numbers are put together in languages, German is positively simple and understandable.
Pretty sure it’s some very old way of counting.
English used to do it the same way after all.
There’s this nursery rhyme about “four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” that I can’t remember the rest of. Except that the previous or next verse ended with “rye”.
I think that’s because of Martin Luther. When he translated the bible he basically standardised the German language. So blame him.
Here’s a short documentary on it. https://youtu.be/L5YZSZTO2tk