TIL that it not French with the weirdest way to count. I still don't really get the Danish way. Even with your explanation.

Funny enough, I grew up saying "quarter of eight" to mean 19:45. It took until my mid-20s to realize its probably a regional thing because, after I left Philadelphia (my home city) and moved to Chicago, everyone thought I meant 20:15.

We also do this in germany

Thats pretty common in terms of time. I'm not going to say something is "half five" to say it coststwo and a half dollars though. I understand that with French and Danish you arent actually doing the math and just think of that string the same way i think of "ninety two" but it's still difficult to wrap my head around.

Yes, absolutely! My work is related to monasteries. Some of these institutions were large economical organisations with hundreds or thousands of affiliated workers (in addition to the few dozens of actual clergy) stretching hundreds of villages/cities. Monastaries basically were the major corporations of the time. They did handle these amounts of money regularly.

Historical purchasing power for anything before the industrial revolution is hard to approximate. On the one hand because wages were not only payed in money, on the other hand because labor was very cheap and material cost was high - the inverse of today. To illustrate: They did lots of recycling work that would seem fanatical to us today, e.g. straightening old nails, reusing stones and wood from deconstructions, or even excavating and resharpening rotten fenceposts. To add some general and very rough perspective: An unskilled worker/day-worker could expect a yearly wage in the order of magnitude of about 5 fl (guilders) per year for very hard work and long working hours for 6 or 7 days a week (payed daily in non-face-value coins like pennies). However, it was common for wages to include living accomodation and/or food staples (that included wine or beer) - or pay out the worth of these things, separately. A pair of shoes was a valued gift one could give to an unskilled worker on special occasions.

It was a different time with different societal and economical systems in place. Estimated simplifications you might read online (e.g. 1 fl = 50€) are therefor to be taken with a buttload of salt - to the point one might call it a misrepresentation. Then there were the multiple events with increased silver and gold imports from the new world (combined with some greedy/desperate lords reducing the silver share of their coins). This led to multiple changes in the exchange rates between various regional gold, silver and non-face-value coins of the same names, complicating thing even more.

To solve these issues, the prices I named above would be in fictional coins of account, not actual physical coins that were payed. People had to do quite some math when doing accounting - and yes, minor errors happened all the time.

It's a pretty enormous amount of money now. I was thinking that a gold coin was 1oz which would have been an insane amount of money but some research has told me that guilder can refer to several different coins that are between .08oz and .11oz of gold mixed with other precious metals. Ignoring the other precious metals and assuming the lowest gold content 1457.5 guilders is a bit over 116 oz of gold. Gold is approx. $1900/oz so in gold alone that is over $220,000.

Which is why it doesn't make sense that it's colored green

Oh yeah, thanks for the correction, the joke was still worth it ;)

I guess the telephone just didn't arrive properly in German speaking countries, at least we will soon get rid of most fax machines, hopefully that is...

Man I'd love for that to catch on, mostly so it's easier to learn. Kids get confused by the order all the time. It's even shorter in some cases.

Also, the reverse order makes dictating phone numbers such a pain.

(It only applies to the tens tho)

Tens, but also ten-thousands, ten-millions, ten-billions ... you get the gist.