Comment by drewmate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewmate | Hacker News Reader

I didn't see Russian listed anywhere on there, but I suspect it would be in the top 20 on this list. It is a pretty straightforward base 10 complicated by archaic phonetic rules that change the pronunciation and stress of words with logical roots in unintuitive ways.

In addition, countable nouns (like cars, people, cities, but also including multiples of 100, 1000, etc...) change form depending on how many of them there are (1, 2-4, 5-20, 21-24, 25-30 etc...) Usually these separate forms are phonetically related, but sometimes there is no connection at all. These rules don't come in to play when strictly counting numbers until 200, but is an integral part of what makes it hard to count things in Russian.

There are also wrinkles like the word for 40 (сорок) and 90 (девяносто) that don't fit in the usual tens pattern like 20 (двадцать - two * ten) or 30 (тридцать - three * ten). Any Russian speakers care to explain what's going on with those two?

Initially, Russian used the same convention for 40 as it does for other multiples of 10. Other Slavic languages still do. However, 4 (четыре) is the longest word by syllable count in the 1..10 range, so over time a shorter word that used to mean "a bag with 40 skins" (apparently a standard count to make some article of garment) came to replace it. The original meaning is all but forgotten now, and сорок means only 40 now.

90 also used to use the more common form of "nine tens", but for some reason came to be replaced by something that looks like it means "nine out of hundred" but the etymological explanations for it seem to be rather inconsistent. One explanation is that Russians used to count by 9 -- remnants of that can be seen in fairy tale expressions for "very far" -- "beyond three times nine lands".

Thanks for sharing. Studying Russian has helped me notice interesting patterns in languages. Where there is much friction (due to heavy usage, difficult pronunciation, or both) languages tend to break rules to make things easier to say.

For example, it's trivial to conjugate a verb like "контролировать" that you might only use occasionally, but verbs that you say dozens or hundreds of times a day, like "идти" become increasingly irregular.

You're welcome.

Irregular verbs generally tend to be the ones that are used most often, and that are most archaic.

Looking at languages there are lost of interesting patterns you can notice. It's even more fun if you look at ones from an entirely different family. Some agglutinating languages may have no irregular verbs at all.

Concerning 40 - “sorok” was a name for a unit of measure for fur. One sorok was a bundle consisting of 40 animal furs.

As for 90 - devyanosto - I think it comes from “9 to 100”. Its strange though its 9 and not 10.

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