Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
There's good reason and logic behind the names - but they're abbreviated and slightly corrupted/changed in the last thousand years. '50' which today sounds like 'half-sixty' originally meant 'half-three-times-twenty' which translates to 'three-minus-a-half-times twenty' = 2.5*20 (= 50), 60 is 'three-times-twenty'.
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I like to think about it (after reading and excellent an thick
book on numbers by Georges Ifrah) as:
60 -> "third", meaning "three people", where each person counts as 20, because they have 20 fingers and toes.
50 -> "half third", meaning "two people and one half of the third", so that's 40+20/2=50
and 70 is "half fourth" and 90 "half fifth", of course
It's like saying the time in German, after all.