So, in Britain, I can’t say:
$19.95: That will be nineteen ninety-five, please.
?
You can’t say beacuse, you’d go bust pretty quickly if you had your prices in dollars.
In Britain a price like £19.95 would usually be stated as ‘nineteen ninety-five’ as would the year 1995. But the number 1995 would always be stated as ‘one thousand nine hundred and ninety-five’.
It’s not a difficult concept to understand.
It does? What Legally authorized Nation board published them and enforces them? :dubious:Please give me a cite.
There are “style guides” but they often disagree. In any case, they are *guides. *
There are no “Rules” for English.
My guess is that’s the way you were taught or the way you have learned from a style guide your teacher/employer/self prefer, and thus because you prefer that style guide, you have now decided “it’s the rules”.
sigh
Rules are implicit in language, read a book on linguistics or cognitive science and you will find this out. When we form a sentence we do so by using a set of rules in our head.
I really don’t think your grasping what I’m saying. I’m not trying to prescribe a rule for (British) English, I’m trying to describe a rule, in this case the rule is where ‘and’ should be used when stating numbers.
Obviously the rules exist in people’s minds and can be different for different people, particualrly where there are dialectal differences. But in this instane I can be pretty secure as we’re talking about rule that really is the rule for speakers of British English.
Sure, we try to use language that adds to understanding and clarity. That’s a “rule”. Inserting or not inserting a “and” in a written out number does not add or subtract to understanding or clarity. Thus, your 'rule" is not implicit.
But since we have many folks giving a different opinion, and it doesn’t add to clarity, your “rule” isn’t a “rule” at all. It’s simply your opinion of what you think sounds nicer.
I’m an American, unfamiliar with British traditions. I would appreciate an explanation of what the rules are. For the number £2,019.95 (or £2.019,95, if you prefer), would you say “two thousand and nineteen ninety-five” or “two thousand nineteen ninety-five” or “two thousand nineteen and ninety-five” or what?
For the number “2,002,102”, how many “ands” would you include?
- Two million and two thousand and one hundred and two?
- Two million two thousand one hundred and two?
- Two million and two thousand and one hundred two?
- Two million and two thousand one hundred and two?
- Two million two thousand and one hundred and two?
- Two million and twenty-one hundred and two?
To me, it just seems clear, easy, and unambiguous to never include “and,” but if there are straightforward rules for when to include the “and” and when not to, perhaps it’s the same for those of you used to the British system.
Oh, but there is. At least if you write for a living. In technical and scientific writing, terseness is highly prized, as long as the terseness doesn’t introduce ambiguity or reduce the amount of information presented.
Since removing “and” from numbers shortens the sentence and removes ambiguity, it’s a win all the way around.
Never mind. Duplicate argument.
We use rules in language as knowing the meanings of words is not enough to form sentences. Changing word order or omitting words can totally alter the meaning of a sentence. For example the sentences “Paul ate the fish” and “The fish ate Paul” contain the same words, but have conflicting meanings.
Rules are implicit by usuage. In this particular example, whilst if someone said “hundred forty-four” in an American accent I would almost certainly get their meaning being aware of the differences between my own dialect and their’s (though in my first post I must admit I completely forgot this difference), if someone said the number 144 as “hundred forty-four” in a British accent then it would (for me) subtract from the clarity of what they were saying.
Rules do not always exist for reasons of clarity anyway. For example if somone said “I goed to the zoo”, whilst grammatically incorrect, their meaning is still clear. ‘To go’ is an irregular verb and the rule is that ‘went’ is the past tense of go. This rule is pretty much universal among people who speak English as a first language, but it adds nothing to clarity.
And yet you write the above, instead of “There is, in technical writing, which highly prizes terseness (without information-loss).” Because there’s nothing wrong with writing things which are less terse than possible. Even in technical writing, a writer who decides to remove “and” from number-names for no reason other than blind word count minimization is myopically fussing over piddling details that are of no significance to anyone. Seriously, how could it actually matter? It’s on the level of proscribing the spelling “homogeneous” because it uses one more letter than the spelling “homogenous”, or the word “autumn” because it’s a syllable larger than the word “fall”. It’s meaningless quantification.
Not so. It is an accurate statement about British English. In US English, the use of “and” in that context may be matter of preference. In British English, the “and” is mandatory. Any discussion of whether it sounds nicer, is more logical or less so, adds or takes away clarity, is irrelevant to that point.
The OP asked about the correct way to write certain numbers. We don’t know the OP’s location. Therefore, it is reasonable in answering his/her question to point out that the correct answer will differ depending on his/her location.
In Britain, do you normally write out numbers 3 or more digits long?
In America, we usually write them out numerically.
(Using figures rather than words, I think you mean. It would be difficult to not write numbers numerically.)
The distinction here, though, is that while English definitely has rules, they are ones of grammar and syntax which almost no native speaker ever breaks. “Me go with she” is not good English, because other than the possessive, the one survivor of case in English is in the pronouns. “Park to the goes he” is likewise a sybtactic nightmare; while inversions are permissible in poetry and occasionally in prose to give emphasis, this scatters the words of “he goes to the park” in an order not acceptable in English syntax. And probably everyone, descriptivist or not, would agree that those constructions are not acceptable English sentences.
Where the “rules” dispute usually lies is either in claiming for the formal written register a propriety not possessed by other registers, or else trying to elevate preferred usages to “the one right way to say it.” Any Englishman (or Welshman or Scot, for that matter) will recognize what number is described in the American style; any American, likewise in the British style. Neither is “right” except where “right” refers to national usage preferences. When Alcoa ships 1,000 ingots from Knoxville to the English Birmingham, it leaves the U.S. as “aluminum” but somewhere in mid-Atlantic picks up an extra “i” and arrives as “aluminium”. And neither is more “right” than the other.
Nor, getting away from national or regional preference, is “It is I” better English than “It’s me.” Both have their place in the appropriate register. A 12-year-old boy seeking entry to his friend’s treefort will not use “It is I” – it’s as much a solecism for the register he is speaking in as would “It’s me” be at a hyperformal high tea.
Rules, insofar as they exist, describe grammatical and syntactical standards used by everyone. It’s inappropriate to look on advisories of what is inappropriate in various registers as “rules for good English” – they’re not; they’re the equivalent of etiquette books, telling people who already know how to conduct themselves in informal situations the appropriate differences when they enter a formal situation.
Midwestern American here, adding my personal data point: I also remember my elementary school teachers flogging the ‘no and unless a fraction follows’ rule. It’s pretty well ingrained in my thinking, such that when I hear ‘number number and number’ I am left hanging, waiting for the denominator shoe to drop.
I cannot claim that my personal speech is perfect with respect to this rule, though. Off the top of my head, I suspect that I sneak ‘and’ into numbers as an intensifier, to emphasize an unusually large or significant number. ‘That dude got shot a hundred and twenty times.’ If the number could be followed by an expletive it’ll probably have an ‘and’ in it.
There is no mandatory in English.
You said it far better than I, Poly.
“Two million, two thousand, one hundred and two” is how most Brits would say it. Basically a list.
Again though, I really don’t think you understand what I’m saying, I’m not talking about etiquette or ‘proper English’. A rule in language is an abstract procedure for generating sentences.
That a rule may exist in one dialect/language, but may not exist (or be a matter of personal preference) in another and the two still are mutually intelligible does not make it any less of a rule in the dialect/language where it is a rule. Like I said earlier it’s even quite possible to break the rules that apply universally in the English language and still form sentences who’s meaning is crystal clear. Children do this all the time when they are learning a language.
I think the main point of misunderstanding here is that the particualr rule under discussion here really is a general rule in British English. It’s a strong rule that is rartely if ever broken. In American English in generral of course it is not a strong rule and infact personal preference does enter in to it a lot, but this does not subtract from the fact that in British English it is just as strong a rule as some of the rules that occur universally in the English language.
We understand you perfectly, so let me make it very clear- it is not a RULE. It’s *your own *preference.
If you wish to say that it’s the most common usage in GB, then fine. But there’s no such [B"]rule".**
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. "
Perhaps I should be less obtuse, but I know you are not understanding what I am saying because my posts have been anwsered with observations about etiquette and ‘proper English’, which to me are irrelevant as I am making an observation about a particular dialect of English. I am not attaching any value judgement to thta dialect or others. It’s also a dialect where I feel pretty comfortable making statements about usuage as it is my own dialect.
Like I said a rule in language is an abstract procedure for generating sentences (or in this case more likely a sentence fragment). Let’s take a rule for example for forming the past tenses of a verb, whilst there are irregular verbs which do not follow this rule*, the general rule is that you add an -ed to the end or simply a -d if the verb ends in e to form the past simple and particple. Let’s take the verb that I have just made up: ‘to trafalate’, now I have never seen this verb but I know already how to form both the past simple and past participle of the verb i.e. ‘trafalated’
Now let’s take the number 2,457,985,532 as an example, the chances of my having ever seen this number written down in words or having heard it spoken is exceedingly small, yet I can say it (in my dialect) as “two trillion four hundred and fifty-seven million nine hundred and eighty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-two” despite having never encountered it before as I have in my possession a rule (or set of rules) on how to do so.
Now in US English there are several competing sets of rules on how to do what I did in the preceding paragraph, but that is neither here nor there as I have made a statement about British English where these alternate sets of rules are simply never used.
When using language we use memory and rules to form sentences so for example the sentence “The horse rode the bicycle to the habedashers” is not one I have heard before so I must’ve used rules to generate it, but at the same time for example the definition of the word “horse” is purely from my memory and I have used no rule to form it. Steven Pinker covers a lot of these ideas in his book “Words and Rules”.
*irregular verbs obviously complicate slightly what I have said, as infact when encountering a new verb which looks like it belongs irregular grouping it can cause confusion about to form different tenses take.