Sev, Sevteen, Sevty, Sevth |
June 7th, 2024 |
| ideas, ling |
I don't like the number seven. Well, really the name of the number
seven. All the other single digit numbers are single syllable, and
seven has to go and take two. Seventy and seventeen have the same
problem. What can we do?
I think the two main candidates are "sev" (dropping the second syllable) and "sen" (dropping the first coda and second onset). While I find "sen" slightly nicer on the tongue, I think "sev" is more promising because it feels like a better short form.
It feels like we ought to be able to switch to calling it "sev", where some people just start saying that and other people understand them? I've been playing around it, but every time I do my toddler Nora laughs at me as if I'm being ridiculously over the top: "you said sev!!" Does not bode well for a low-key migration.
This is something I didn't anticipate having any opinion about, but now here I am, so: I think I'm more in favor of sen than sev. "Sev" feels like a teen boy's nickname; "sen" feels both more familiar and more sophisticated (i.e., "s'en" as "o'er"). I also think that the other forms, especially senth, are a fair bit easier to say!
I typically use “sev” when I’m musically counting and only have time for one syllable. I think because “sev eight” feels better in my mouth than “sen eight”
"sevth" is kind of rough
Daniel but not as bad as "sixth", no?
Danielprobably that could migrate to 'seth'
In the most recent Survivor season, there was a player who insisted that "several" meant "seven". It became a running gag.
My Irish dance teacher growing up counted with sev to keep it one syllable. For certain hornpipe steps we had to count to eleven once in a while and that was shortened to lev
What about fixing the inconsistency the other way? We could add -ven to all the base words (oneven, twoven, etc) and then they would work like the -ty and -teen words. Seventeen and seventy pose an issue but we can just rename them seteen and sety.
How about "sep" or "sept"?
Number names should have a number of syllables equal to the numeric value.
Jonah unary all the way!
Ven, venteen, venth, venty The only collision is with Starbucks.
names of numbers in finnish are so long that if you're counting in for music you use just the first syllable. "yksi kaksi kolme neljä" --> "y ka ko ne"
@jefftk I think "sen" feels a lot more natural; if I'm counting as fast as I can from one to ten, I'm very likely to blur "seven" into "sen" anyway, and likewise "seventy-one" feels very natural to blur into "senty-one" or "senny-one". Then again, having said that, I feel like "five six sev eight nine" isn't awkward either. And I might naturally blur "seventy-one" into more like "seven-one" if I'm going fast. Hm.
I do this (with "sev") when counting to myself. Nice to see the other people chose the same shelling point!
Why not "sen"? If not for written language, seven would likely already be pronounced this way. The process was under way. Weeks were once called sennights. And even people who don't usually say it this way often do when drunk. True, there tends to be a glottal stop after the e before the n when the v is elided, but not always.
What to do about zero? Just reduce it to oh, like in casual speech or when reciting telephone numbers.
oh, one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, eight, nine, ten.
There! All single syllables.
I do sort of the same thing, except I'm pretty sure I'm pronouncing the "e" in "sen" as a long "e" in the literal linguistic vowel-length sense. I wonder if this is how English gets phonemic vowel length back?
Yeah that seems right to me too … I asked Claude for analogous cases and it brought up the historical dropping of sounds in the middle of the words “Wednesday”, “half”, and “chalk”.
Sincere response: Could work, but I weep for the lost clarity caused by sen and ten rhyming. Our current digits are beautifully unambiguous this way, whereas our alphabet is a horrible lost cause which had to be completely replaced over low-fidelity audio channels.
Sarcastic response: I'll agree iff 10 becomes teven.
I say "zero" when reciting phone numbers. Harder to miss that way.
That's the wise thing to do, but people routinely use oh. Five-oh-six-three-four-oh-one. In fact, zero might sound overly formal to me depending on the context. If I am reading my credit card number, I would say zero.
For whatever it's worth, this problem seems to have its roots in Proto-Indo European, with only a few languages managing to shorten it from the original two-syllable word to one, although even in those cases it looks to me like the words still end up with two moras even if they do manage to fit in a single syllable.
in Russian: syem