• TaTTe@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I’m not Danish, but I think he meant 4.5 instead of 2.5. It’s like halfway from 4 to 5, not from 0 to 5.

    A similar word exists in Finnish too, when going from 1 to 2: “puolitoista” translates to “half second”, like halfway to the second number, and is commonly used to refer to 1.5, BUT without any multiplication shenanigans.

    • VonReposti@feddit.dk
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      1 day ago

      Correct.

      • Half to the second (halvanden, still in use today) = 1.5
      • Half to the third (halvtredje) = 2.5
      • Half to the fourth (halvfjerde) = 3.5
      • Half to the fifth (halvfemte) = 4.5

      And so on. You might notice that I sometimes write it like “halvfemte” and other times “halvfems”. The latter is just the way it was spelled when used in a combined word (another fun quirk in Danish that we inherited from Germanic this time!). 90 is today spelled just “halvfems”.