four and twenty

[Amorelli]

Curiouser and curiouser:   "[...]No less mysterious is the way the terms
'twenty-one' and 'one-and-twenty' move up [England] in alternating bands. In
London people say 'twenty-one', but if you move forty miles to the north
they say 'one-and-twenty'. Forty miles north of that and they say
'twenty-one' again. And so it goes right up the way to Scotland, changing
from one to the other every forty miles or so. Just to complicate things, in
Boston, in Lincolnshire, they say that a person is twenty-one years old, but
that he has one-and-twenty marbles, while twenty miles away in Louth, they
say the very opposite.'MOTHER TONGUE,Bill Bryson Penguin 1991 (at Chapter 7
'Varieties of English' on the subject of 'The Linguistic Atlas of Britain')
M.I.Amorelli
Faculties of Economics and Law
University of Sassari

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Frank" <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 9:21 AM
Subject: four and twenty


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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Frank <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
> Subject:      four and twenty
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>
> I'm curious. When did English speakers quit saying things like four and
> twenty in normal conversation? Did they ever? The reason I'm asking is
> that this morning I blogged the following:
>
> The French say soixante-dix-neuf (sixty-ten-nine) when they want to
> express the number 79. Germans say neunundsechzig (nine-and-sixty). In
> an interview with Der Spiegel, a German mathematician proposes that the
> way numbers are spoken in German be changed to make mental arithmetic
> easier. He wants Germans to say zwanzigeins (twenty-one) instead of
> einundzwanzig (one-and-twenty). Come to think of it, backward numbers
> used to be common in English too. Children still sing the old nursery
> rhyme:
>
> Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,
> Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
> When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
> Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?
>
> Paul
> ________________________
> Paul Frank
> Chinese-English translator
> paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
> http://languagejottings.blogspot.com
>
>
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