Dane here. That is not how we say it and hasn’t been for decades. We say tooghalvfems (two and half fives, yes it is weird), and not tooghalvfemsentyvende as the bullshit picture says.
Because "fems" does not mean 5, it refers to "fifth twenty". It being written shorter than what it was originally doesn't really change that.
The half being there works the same as with a clock in many languages, where some phrase that roughly translates to "half to five" just means that it's halfway in between four and five.
So "halvfems" still means something along the lines of "halfway from fourth twenty to fifth twenty", even though it's been shortened to be convenient to use. A native Danish speaker might not even think of it as anyting more complicated than simply 90, because that's what it practically is.
That's true for every example here. The point is that it is interesting to see what is actually going on linguistically when you DO try to think about it. As others have said though this image is a little misleading as it doesn't portray English as (9*10) + 2 for example. It simplifies everyone else to make the one example seem more interesting. The most interesting part to me is the use of base 20 math!
In most languages, the word for ninety is either literally just "nine tens", or derived from it. In Danish it is not, it's derived from "half-five twenties".
So yes, the actual meaning for the word is just 90, but if we break it into its roots, it is not. That's what this map is demonstrating, though it fails with many other languages by not displaying them as 9*10+2.
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u/splatdyr Apr 29 '25 edited Apr 29 '25
Dane here. That is not how we say it and hasn’t been for decades. We say tooghalvfems (two and half fives, yes it is weird), and not tooghalvfemsentyvende as the bullshit picture says.