Although the Scandinavian languages are by and large mutually intelligible, Danish has a few distinguishing features that make it unique. For example, its phonology and pronunciation are very different, and it has a distinctive feature known as Stød which is akin to a creak in the voice.
But it’s not just pronunciation that sets Danish apart – the way Danes count is also unique. Rather than using the base-ten system we are used to in English, Danish has a so-called vigesimal system, meaning it is based around the number twenty.
This quirk can very quickly make heads spin when learning the language for the first time. For today’s article, I thought I would take a look at this unique feature of my native language and try to unravel its mysteries for you.
What Makes the Danish Number System Different?
To understand what makes the Danish number system unique, let’s start by looking at how one counts in Swedish or Norwegian. Don’t worry – the system used in these languages is pretty simple and similar to English. You just need to take a few seconds to study the basics of these numbers and the patterns between singles and tens.
In Swedish, the numbers one to ten are as follows: en, två, tre, fyra, fem, sex, sju, åtta, nio and ten.
Ten to twenty are: tio, tjugo, trettio, fyrtio, femtio, sextio, sjuttio, åttio, nittio, ett hundra.
And to make the numbers in between you simply smash them together: tjugotvå is twenty-two, for example, and sjuttionio would be seventy-nine.
Now let’s move on to Danish, which starts off pretty simply. The numbers one to ten are relatively similar to their counterparts in the other languages and literally as simple to use as just counting from one to ten. They are: en, to, tre, fire, fem, seks, syv, otte, ni and ti.
Nice and simple, right? Well hold on to your hat, because this is where it starts to get complicated. Here are the numbers ten to one hundred: ti, tyve, tredive, fyrre, halvtreds, tres, halvfjerds, firs, halvfems and et hundred.
A System Based on Twenties
The reason this second set of numbers looks so different to their Swedish counterparts is that the Danish system is based on twenties rather than tens. Perhaps the first number that stands out to you is halvtreds, the word for 50. This word is actually short for an even more complex, whopping mouthful of a word – halvtredje-sinde-tyve. Literally, this means three minus a half times twenty.
Starting to scratch your head? Just remember the base number is 20. So what this actually means is that you take the base number (20) and multiply it by three minus a half, or to put that another way, two and a half. So 2.5 x 20 = 50. Sixty is a little bit simpler. It is short for tre (three) and sindstyve – so 3 x 20 = 60.
Halvfjerds gets complicated again because this once more involves a deducted half. The fjerds part refers to four times the base number and the halv is the half we’re taking off, leaving us with 3.5 x 20 = 70. Firs is more straight-forward, like sixty, and simply means multiplying the base number by four. And halvfems, finally, means multiplying the base number by five minus a half, i.e. 4.5 x 20 = 90.
Easy as pie, right?
Building Back to Front
Okay, so now that we’ve got a handle on the tens, what about the numbers in between, like twenty-two and so on? As we saw at the beginning of the article, Swedish makes this pretty simple – you simply smash the numbers together. You don’t even need to use a hyphen like in English. Danish, however, takes this system and flips it back to front – literally.
Rather than say twenty-one, the Danes instead express numbers like this as yet another little sum. They say one-and-twenty – a system which will be familiar to anybody who has previously studied German. So with that in mind, take a look at the following words and see if you can work out what they mean:
Syvogtyve
Otteogfyrre
Treogtres
Well, how did you do? Ready for the answers? The numbers above mean twenty-seven, forty-eight and sixty-three. The last one in particular is quite tricky to read if you aren’t familiar with the system as our brains can easily mistake that first tre for a plain-old three rather than tres which means sixty (three times twenty).
Why Does this System Exist?
You may be surprised to know that this system didn’t necessarily develop organically in Denmark and in fact, Danes did not always count this way! According to Danish language researcher Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen, Danes counted in tens up until about the 1300s.
Nobody knows for sure why this system was abandoned in favour of the vigesimal. However, there is research to show that counting in twenties was a phenomenon that likely began in Flensburg, a town that was once under Danish rule but is now part of Germany. From there, it spread eastwards over time, at one point even taking hold in the Swedish region of Scania.
It is also worth noting that Danish is not the only language to use a vigesimal system. Other languages to use this method include French, Gaelic and Bretton. It is therefore not implausible that the Danes adopted this system through contact beyond home borders – or that counting in twenties was once the norm before it died out.
If you think about it, most number systems only stabilise once they hit the number twenty. The teens are often unique and it is only after twenty that a more structured system takes hold. For example, instead of saying ten-nine in English, we say nineteen, while fifteen in Spanish is quince, not diecicino. This suggests that twenty may have been a fairly common base number across languages at one point in time.
What Does the Vigesimal System Mean for Translators?
Fortunately, this system does not usually represent a spanner in the works for translators as Danes tend to express written numbers in digit form and these symbols can be universally understood. However, tricky number words may still come up in written records of speech or in more creative texts. In these cases, it is important that the translator has a good handle on the system and also knows how to incorporate any cultural connotations with which they may be laden.
For more facts about the Nordic region and its language, take a look at some of my previous articles, or pay a visit to the blog on the Comunica blog where we often write about fun traditions and linguistic quirks. It shouldn’t take you longer than three times twenty seconds to find an article you’re interested in!
