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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Dutch does that too, and I've tried out what happens if you say it correctly ("negentig 'n zes", ninety and six, instead of "zes 'n negentig")

It takes a second to process and then they'll ask "do you mean [reverse order variant]?" so they do kinda get it and I think transitioning to the sane version could be possible without much trouble, but people would have to want to

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It's because if it's out of order, your "partial interpretation so far" in your head gets messed up. A relative of mine pulls a version of this in English (that I find hilarious): in American English we usually read phone numbers one digit at a time, but sometimes group pairs of digits, and it doesn't really matter because "forty five" and "four five" present in the same order. Their phone number has a 1 in it, so to prank people that are writing down or typing the number they read it as (numbers made up, but the effect is):

   five
   six
   seven
   four
   -teen

...

and then cracks up. I cracked up when it was done to me, although apparently not everyone finds it so funny. ;)

In France we read our numbers in pairs: 01 23 45 67 89. The initial zero is complicated, it is a butchered-up solution when we were transitioning the numbers and in an international context one never knows whether to say +33 0 1 23 45... or +33 1 23 45... (the latter one is correct, though both will likely work). When you remove the zero in the international version, lots of systems will format the number by triplets, which seems to be more common in Europe (+33 123 456 789)

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