Oops.
And *tuhatyhdeksänsataa *in Finnish.
If the tour guide writer really is Finnish like Anaamika said it’s even weirder that he would make this claim as, like stated before, we have a word for “one and a half”, *puolitoista *(“half of the second”).
This is also how other numbers used to be: even now, 11-19 is *yksitoista *(one of the second [ten])…*yhdeksäntoista *(nine of the the second [ten]), and 20 is *kaksikymmentä *(two tens), but in yonder years, it carried on past that so 25, for example, would be *viisikolmatta *(five of the third ten).
As is the Norwegian equivalent, halvannen. For some reason it seems to be especially common when describing stretches of time: halvannen time, an hour and a half.
Drugi (druga/drugie/drudzy) is the usual word for the ordinal “second.” Looks like wtóry does exist in the language–but it’s an old word that isn’t used much in contemporary Polish. According to this:
This is, without a doubt the finest place in the cyber world to ask off the wall questions!
Tris
That’s interesting. In Bulgarian, drug means “other”, and drugar is “comrade”. (I believe it means “friend” in Russian.)
No real point, it’s just neat to see how languages fit together.
They’re called compounds and English does it all time. What makes Briefträger any different from mail carrier, other than the fact that when it’s written, there’s no space between the words? In speech, there are no spaces or hyphens. And words formed with prefixes are effectively compounds, too.
Most of what is mentioned above in this thread are compounds. I think what Anaamika is interested in are NON-compound words. That is to say, a word that cannot be separated into meaningful constituent parts.
“Drugi” can also mean “other” in Polish, as well. “Drug” is indeed “friend” in Russian (and the source of the word “droog,” in A Clockwork Orange. Russian and just generally Slavic languages were the basis for a lot of the futuristic slang in that book.)
Well, by that standard, I’m not sure that even the OP’s Hindi example dedh/derh counts as non-compound. It’s just a worn-down form of the original Sanskrit dvaiyardha, a compound formed from dvi “two” and ardha “half” (i.e., “half [of the] second”, like “anderhalf” etc.).
There are lots of words that we tend to think of as “single words” that are in fact originally formed from compounds (for instance, English “husband” from hus “house” and bondi “dweller”).
I’m not convinced that Hindi dedh should automatically count as “non-compound” while words like anderhalf shouldn’t, merely because the compound origin of dedh is less immediately recognizable.
Well if that’s the case then perhaps Anaamika’s tour guide was just selling a bill of goods, because that isn’t anything so special.
In my experience, tour guide information should always be *highly *suspect unless confirmed by a reliable source.