Now imagine moving there as a foreigner from a normal country and someone telling you their phone number! It's like having a micro stroke.

1.5 is "half second", 2.5 is "half third", 4.5 is "half fifth"

Interesting. ~~Regionally, some~~ Germans measure time like this, i.e. "half two" is 01:30 resp. 13:30. (Which is different from English, where people who say "half two" mean "half past two".)

We've since made the "times twenty" implicit for maximum confusion, so it's just said as "two and half fifths".

I know very little about Danish, but I learned that Danes slur the middle of most words. So I suspect you actually pronounce even less of the word than you'd write..?

Because language is stubborn.

Belgian French gives me hope.

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[Edited: Usage is not regional]

So the Danish can do this bullshit with everyday numbers and it’s cool because language , but I mention that it’s 70 degrees outside and everyone starts arguing about metric?

Everything is arbitrary, I’m gonna go build a dresser in multiples of rabbit foot while you all figure something out.

And to confuse even further, the cardinal number (ninety-two) is "to-og-halv-fems" in Danish without the *20. But if you need the ordinal number (92nd), then we add in the x20 as in "to-og-halv-fem-sinds-tyvende". Danish is very easy and transparent 😊

So to say 102 in French, you'd say four-times-twenty-plus-twenty-two.

I don't believe you.

EDIT: What in the actual fuck. You were right. 😳

Yes, absolutely! My work is related to monasteries. Some of these institutions were large economical organisations with hundreds or thousands of affiliated workers (in addition to the few dozens of actual clergy) stretching hundreds of villages/cities. Monastaries basically were the major corporations of the time. They did handle these amounts of money regularly.

Historical purchasing power for anything before the industrial revolution is hard to approximate. On the one hand because wages were not only payed in money, on the other hand because labor was very cheap and material cost was high - the inverse of today. To illustrate: They did lots of recycling work that would seem fanatical to us today, e.g. straightening old nails, reusing stones and wood from deconstructions, or even excavating and resharpening rotten fenceposts. To add some general and very rough perspective: An unskilled worker/day-worker could expect a yearly wage in the order of magnitude of about 5 fl (guilders) per year for very hard work and long working hours for 6 or 7 days a week (payed daily in non-face-value coins like pennies). However, it was common for wages to include living accomodation and/or food staples (that included wine or beer) - or pay out the worth of these things, separately. A pair of shoes was a valued gift one could give to an unskilled worker on special occasions.

It was a different time with different societal and economical systems in place. Estimated simplifications you might read online (e.g. 1 fl = 50€) are therefor to be taken with a buttload of salt - to the point one might call it a misrepresentation. Then there were the multiple events with increased silver and gold imports from the new world (combined with some greedy/desperate lords reducing the silver share of their coins). This led to multiple changes in the exchange rates between various regional gold, silver and non-face-value coins of the same names, complicating thing even more.

To solve these issues, the prices I named above would be in fictional coins of account, not actual physical coins that were payed. People had to do quite some math when doing accounting - and yes, minor errors happened all the time.

It's a pretty enormous amount of money now. I was thinking that a gold coin was 1oz which would have been an insane amount of money but some research has told me that guilder can refer to several different coins that are between .08oz and .11oz of gold mixed with other precious metals. Ignoring the other precious metals and assuming the lowest gold content 1457.5 guilders is a bit over 116 oz of gold. Gold is approx. $1900/oz so in gold alone that is over $220,000.

Yes, but in Basque.