Colors, localized.

I almost missed the Spanish upsidedown semicolon

¿Wait what?
- In Spanish we open and close all quotations. Like:
  ¿Tienes cambio? (do you have change?)
  ¡Me encanta! (I love it!)

Just started learning French only to find out you need a Bachelor’s in math just to count past 70.

In Swiss French we say « septante » (70) « huitante » (80) and « nonante » (90) which is better than counting by 20
- Swiss French doesn't count as French (like Schwiizerdütsch isch nöd Dütsch)
- So does Walloon French.
English used to do this too. The most famous example is the first line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

As a French, I understand this post and it hurts because it’s true.

as someone who gave up on learning french because of those shenanigans, i feel validated
- IIRC there's some French dialects (Walloon/Belgium French IIRC) that count normally.

//German

Farbe="#Neunundneunzigdoppelefdoppela;"

I love that song!
- Hast du etwas zeit für mich
More like:
// German
Farbe = "#(9&90)FFAA";

programming x linguistics humor

As a programmer and a linguist, this is the kind of content that really gets the happy chemicals flowing through my monkey brain
- Actually, is there a linguistics lemmy instance or community?

German translation probably boils down to:

farbe = '#9FA²'

More efficient, saves half the characters!

I don’t how you teach basic counting at a young age in French without learning higher grade level math.

Joke aside, it's not taught as 4 × 20 +10 but simply “90 is pronounced quatre-vingt-dix” — which kinda is a mouthful, but you rarely count to 90 as a kid anyway.
- Sounds like you were just a quitter. I counted to 100 all the time to show off.
- It's only 3.5 syLAbles, barely longer to say then "seventy".
- Which surely works only until you need to say 91, which does not start "quatre-vingt-dix."

As guy who hate French language and was learning in 1999 I can confirm it was pain to read the topic of lesson and the date. I was so happy when we switched to 2000.

Whole generations of French students that have no idea they escaped having to write "mille neuf cent quatre-vingt dix-neuf" over and over again, in cursive of course.
- Wait - is this why kids are dumber today ?

I’d argue it’s 4*20+19 in French, though, otherwise you’d probably need to change some of the other 99 to 90+9.

Nineteen is dix-neuf though. Which is literally ten-nine. 11-16 all have an equivalent word to the English “teens.” Quatorze for example instead of dix-quatre for 14.
- Yes but 99 is also literally ninety nine, so the English ones should be 90+9 🤷‍♂️ don’t know about Spanish, though

Quatre-vingts-dix-neuf! 🤣

Or as my American-ass says, "Cat vank deez noofs."

Takes notes
Next time meeting someone who might speaks french: Pontjur fellow frenchman, i need cat wank deez nutz of those poms

Now do the same for: color-primary, color-secondary, button-color ....

Yeah. Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand it. ELI5?
- The American is how it is supposed to be.
  The British one has the "color" changed changed to "colour" due to British spelling of color.
  The Spanish one has an upside down semi colon because in Spanish you write questions like this: ¿Is this an example question?
  The French one is because the French number system makes absolutely no sense and to say 99 you have to say quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (meaning 4 x 20 + 19).
  I hope this helps somehow.
- French being french. They have no word for ninety for example, it's four-twenty-ten. Not bullshitting you.
  As in Four (times) twenty (plus) 10.

Wait, spanish doesn't do the "we don't have a word for that number, just do math instead" counting system?? I thought the romance languages were tight!

Well, there isn't a word for 99 in Spanish or English, in both languages we say 90+9, so that counts as maths.
If you are asking about words for 70, 80 and 90, that is a peculiarity of French, and not even all dialects, some dialects have septante, huitante/octante and nonante for those.
haha no
It's just the French being weird, there's even some non-France French dialects that count normally.
The Spanish might talk too fast to understand anyway, though.
French is the only Romance language that does the count-by-twenties thing, as far as I know, but apparently some of the Celtic languages do it too. So French may have picked it up from Breton (or Gaulish or who-knows).

If you think French is bad...

    
// Danish
farve = "#(9+½+5)FFAA"

Please elaborate. Any background on this?
- The Danish word for 99 is nioghalvfems, which literally means "nine and half five." Which you could be forgiven for assuming meant 11½. The trick is that a) "half five" actually means 4½, as in half less than five, and b) it's implied that you're supposed to multiply the second part by 20. So the proper math is 9 + (-½ + 5) * 20 = 99.

Belgian and Swiss French speakers smirking...

Relevant Matt Colbo

Four score and nineteen reds?

& german?