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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Using fewer syllables to express numbers
yencabulator wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
Finnish averages pretty close to 1 syllable per digit when you want it
to.
Here's a Finn counting 1, 2, 3, ... 87 (and ending in very Finnish
way):
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G57Zp7ZXYik
vincent-manis wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
I tried "4765" (four syllables), and got "sixty-nine squared plus four"
(6 syllables).
The ICAO phonetic alphabet specifically pronounces "4" as "fouwer", and
"9" as "niner", so as to increase redundancy on a noisy channel.
xvilka wrote 9 hours 9 min ago:
Use Chinese to get the least amount of syllables.
z2 wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
Very true, worst case is 2n-1 syllables for n digits.
ch4s3 wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
I'd love to see this done for French numbers, and no cheating with
huitante or nonante.
jihadjihad wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
Cheating? At least it's still base-10!
ch4s3 wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
That's why it's cheating! Quatre-vingt-dix-sept is obviously the
correct way to say 97.
altairprime wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
And fewer syllables for 970067! (I think?)
pimlottc wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
I got one that ended with âminus ninety halvesâ. How is âninety
halvesâ better than âforty-fiveâ?
rdlw wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
"Our first priority is to minimize sylliness, but I think our second
priority should be to maximize silliness. And 'thirty squared
twelfths' is certainly sillier."
driggs wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission
title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility.
As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky
number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of
8 like this:
> one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight
Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is
especially tricky. It'd be easiest to do it in hexadecimal-style, but
somehow I can't bring myself to count a part out as:
> one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, nine, a, b, c, d, e, f,
g
If only I could convince musicians to use zero-based indexing instead
of one-based.
sublinear wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
I'm having a hard time thinking of a good time signature that accents
on a subdivision smaller than an eighth. Can you give an example?
I also don't know any musicians that would count everything. I
usually hear "and", "and" "uh", "ee" "and" "uh", etc. between the
downbeats and numbers are typically used to count whole notes.
throw-the-towel wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
In French, all numbers between 10 and 15 except 14 are monosyllabic!
So, you just might say "dix, onze, douze" and so on. (Quatorze will
have to become 'torze or something.)
Aardwolf wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
16 too: seize
peterlada wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
Sez -single syllable
chrismorgan wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
Iâve settled on âsenâ for seven when I want it short.
Zero could also do with being a monosyllable, but at least we have
âohâ and ânilâ for that.
Then there are letters. 25 of them are monosyllables (though a few
like âaitchâ and âkyooâ cut it fine), then w (double you) is
three syllables, and not even right, itâs double vee.
Unfortunately, once I mysteriously manage to right these two wrongs,
power will go to my head, and Iâll go ahead with other spelling
reforms and abolishing a few stupid letters like c and x and
replacing them with others for all those poor fricatives that have
been loaded onto -h digraphs.
And while all thatâs going on, Iâll be learning Telugu better,
and it will laugh at me with its average of 2.5 syllables per digit.
idiotsecant wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
W='dub'. It's not even a made up thing, plenty of people said
'dubdubdub dot' back in the days when people spoke urls aloud like
savages.
drob518 wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
If youâre counting it fast, you can run things together a bit:
One, two, three, four, five, six, sev, nate
IsTom wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
Personally I prefer to use non-numerical word phrases (especially in
odd meters) with the right number of syllables instead. If you want
to you can even place accents where they're supposed to be with right
words.
fph wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
Can you share a few examples?
IsTom wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
Well, they're mostly in my native language, but it would be
something like "hor-ses jum-ping e-ver-glade" to count to 7 in
2-2-3 grouping
altairprime wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
It helps to count from a as either zero or one (use âoâ as zero
then) rather than a as ten. Wonât help you with hexadecimal
compatibility if you take the former but it should overcome the brain
obstacle, and scales up to x/26ths at least.
toast0 wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
I was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I never
had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted that high), it
just gets two half-duration notes compared to the others. NBD
Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's wrong
with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we would did one
eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision, but I forget the
triplet division.
The drummers all seemed to have a common syntax for different note
length patterns without numbers, which you could probably drop in
between numbered beats too.
driggs wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
Because that's for half-time!
SilasX wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a
proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common
usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup:
MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC
There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have
more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering
sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive
load of saying it. So native Chinese speakers are much better at it
than Spanish.
English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable ...
except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause a massive
amount of good, when summed over all the times people have to
remember numbers.
The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-compatible
way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just commit to
pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word as se--n), and
eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation and codified as
standard. As long as the listener is expecting a number there, they
will automatically fill in the missing sounds and parse it as a 7.
Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or sen."
Who's with me?
altairprime wrote 8 hours 42 min ago:
Senâs good to me!
bediger4000 wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
Given all of music's esoteric conventions and historical vestiges,
I'm surprised they don't zero index. Octaves divided into thirds and
fifths, who decided that was ok?
driggs wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
Oof, "zero" is two syllables so we'll have to pronounce it "null".
pluralmonad wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Zed is probably fine.
chrisweekly wrote 9 hours 2 min ago:
That reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my "flowstate"
playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat with polyrhythms that
caught my ear. I tried counting along and realized the primary beat
is in 7/8, and in confirming it found myself counting, "one, two,
three, four, five, six, sen, one,...".
1. [1] 2.
URI [1]: https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbK...
URI [2]: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
stronglikedan wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
I'd reverse the second half and count it as: one, two, three, four,
five, six, sev, eight, eight, sev, six, five , four, three, two, one.
jihadjihad wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
> 773466
> two hundred ten cubed twelfths plus twelve cubed minus twelve
Intuitive!
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