this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Ow my brain.
Also funny because I had assumed English got the numbering system from German.
You probably did, but then you did the sensible thing and (mostly) changed it around. You can read some 19th century novels and find stuff like "I am two and twenty years old".
Mostly because it's still the old order for the teens. 1616 could be read as sixteen hundred sixteen, right?
Hmm is that actual English usage or an author thinking in German and translating badly (there were lots of German immigrants to North America).
I don't think e.g. Jane Austen was German.
Or Shakespeare...
Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty.
you're correct, but it may seem antiquated to some.. the full "old" way to say it was 16 hundreds and 16..
when i read 1,500, it's about 50/50 that it's one thousand five hundred, or fifteen hundred
I don't think I've seen people read 1616 as sixteen hundred sixteen. You could read 1600 as sixteen hundred, but when there are numbers in the tens and ones spots I don't see anyone using it. The whole thing using sixteen-hundred is weird to me, it's one thousand six hundred sixteen.
I've heard it lots of times (sometimes just as "sixteen sixteen") - mostly for years though.
And it seems like Wikipedia agrees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_numerals)
And that's because the numbers we use today where originally brought to Europe by Arabs. Arabic is read right to left. So having reading numbers that way used to be the 'correct' way in lots of languages. German is just one of the few ones that stuck with it.
People only borrowed the symbols for numbers from Arabic, not the actual concept of numbers themselves.
I think they used to do it in English as well. For example I remember Jane Austen using both twenty-one and one-and-twenty. So I'm guessing it used to be the same as in German, then for some time you could use both and now one-and-twenty is not used anymore.