• Aarkon@feddit.de
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      2 years ago

      French is inefficient in the sense that you write a lot more letters than you speak, but to my knowledge it’s at least consistent - unlike this JavaScript of spoken languages.

      • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        In German and Spanish, letters have same phonetic in words as in the aplphabet (mostly), but Spain isnt very handy in tecnical and mathematical expressions.

        ON- OFF = ENCENDIDO - APAGADO Worse also French - ninety eight = quatre vingt dix huit = four twenty ten eight

        • Raton_en_Criss@lemmygrad.ml
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          2 years ago

          the french way to spell number is way easier imo, quatre vingt dix huit, 4*20+10+8 = 98, super intuitive when you give it a bit of thought.

          • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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            2 years ago

            Only when you use apart from the fingers, you also use the toes. I would not like the way to express fractions and orders. 43/313 in French, please 😵

        • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
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          2 years ago

          Non ten-exponent numbers is way more common than you think.

          In India, you get the lakh (hundred thousand or 1,00,000), and the crore (ten million or 1,00,00,000), and so on.

          In Chinese, you have one, ten, hundred, thousand. Then wan (ten thousand), ten wan (hundred thousand), hundred wan (million), thousand wan (ten million). Then, you don’t get wan wan (hundred million), you get a new word, yi, then ten yi, hundred yi, so on until you get another new word for yi yi, and so on. Basically, the system is that you can multiply any magnitude word by any magnitude word smaller than it, but once you get to what would have been the magnitude word multiplied by itself, it’s time for a new word. Actually a pretty cool system, coming from a Chinese speaker, but it means it takes me a minute to translate between Chinese and English numbers.