Edit: i still understand being puzzled by this, but the thing is, learning a language partially forces you to learn how the native speakers think… i would even argue that is the final milestone on learning a language.
Spanish found a way to supress the subject from it’s sentences
Germans speak as if they were assembling a puzzle
Japanese looks like a programming language… pretty neat
Russian has two different plurals and the quantity that makes a word fall in the first one or the second one is “arbitrary”.
I know this looks like a gigantic mountain to climb, but i assure you that as you advance, things will progressively make more sense
spoiler
That does not apply to the numbers… it feels like a toddler forgot how to count and started making up shit. What really bothers me is not that but the amiguity… 4 20 sounds exactly as 80
Estonians found a way to communicate without sex, future, articles or prepositions. Oh, sounds like a super easy language to learn with fewer things in it, right? Fuck you, we have 14 cases so we could tell foreigners from native speakers by how they confuse genitive and partitive, two of the most basic cases. And then most cities, towns, villages you’d go to use illative (“into”) to say “I’m going to X”, but some will be allative (“onto”) and there’s no rule for it, so people from other parts of the country might not know it and it’ll sound super weird.
And I still find English to be the weird language. Just look at the different words written as “lead”. Why are they pronounced so differently?! Nothing is pronounced as written.
It is not an ambiguity, it is a remaining from a popular way to count. Just as you may count per hundreds and 4 100 sounds like 400, and means it. But you may also count things by dozen (most likely for eggs…).
Yet you may use “octante” (beligum) or “huitante” (swiss) instead of “quatre-vingt”.
Ok but hear me out. What if colours just had one word instead of two?
It is the same word
Edit: i still understand being puzzled by this, but the thing is, learning a language partially forces you to learn how the native speakers think… i would even argue that is the final milestone on learning a language.
Spanish found a way to supress the subject from it’s sentences
Germans speak as if they were assembling a puzzle
Japanese looks like a programming language… pretty neat
Russian has two different plurals and the quantity that makes a word fall in the first one or the second one is “arbitrary”.
I know this looks like a gigantic mountain to climb, but i assure you that as you advance, things will progressively make more sense
spoiler
That does not apply to the numbers… it feels like a toddler forgot how to count and started making up shit. What really bothers me is not that but the amiguity… 4 20 sounds exactly as 80
Estonians found a way to communicate without sex, future, articles or prepositions. Oh, sounds like a super easy language to learn with fewer things in it, right? Fuck you, we have 14 cases so we could tell foreigners from native speakers by how they confuse genitive and partitive, two of the most basic cases. And then most cities, towns, villages you’d go to use illative (“into”) to say “I’m going to X”, but some will be allative (“onto”) and there’s no rule for it, so people from other parts of the country might not know it and it’ll sound super weird.
And I still find English to be the weird language. Just look at the different words written as “lead”. Why are they pronounced so differently?! Nothing is pronounced as written.
It is not an ambiguity, it is a remaining from a popular way to count. Just as you may count per hundreds and 4 100 sounds like 400, and means it. But you may also count things by dozen (most likely for eggs…).
Yet you may use “octante” (beligum) or “huitante” (swiss) instead of “quatre-vingt”.
You are right… i never paid attention to it cause spanish does not have this until 1000
4 (cuatro), 100 (cien), 400 (cuatrocientos)
4, 1000 (mil), 4000 (cuatromil)
Thanks, this helps me