'round here those would be writen as 0.75 and 3.24 and most likely pronounce “point seven five” “three point two four” or some variation of that, but still saying “point.” How is it pronounced when a comma is used instead?
“wrong?”
In Germany they use the comma this way, and IIRC ithey would say “drei komma zwo vier” and “null komma sieben vier”. Unless it’s an amount of money when it would simply be “Drei Euro vierundswanzig”, and so on.
Now I know how I can rack up 12K posts.
By following me around?
Same in Sweden (but not in German)
Noll comma sjutti-fem.
Tre comma tjugofyra
This is a little off topic, but according to my old roomate (who is a math major and generally anal about this kind of stuff), .75 should not be pronounced “point seven five.” He is convinced that it should only be pronounced " seventy five thousandths. 3.24? Three and twenty four thousandths. Any other pronunciation is wrong.
Anyone else heard of this?
Thousandths?
It would have to be “Seven Hundred and Fifty thousandths” and “Three and Two Hundred and Forty Thousandths”.
Yep, sorta, anyway. An math teacher I had in Jr. High insisted that “and” in a number was to be used only to denote the decimal point. So one should never say, for example, “Four million and seventeen dollars”
I think you probably mean seven hundred and fifty thousandths and three and two hundred and forty thousandths.
I did use this convention back when expressing imperial units in a machine shop.
OK, I must be getting senile. Coulda sworn I’d learned that the first place right of the decimal is tenths, the second hundredths, and the third thousandths. Thus 0.75 could be read as 75 hundredths, and 3.24 could be read as 3 and 24 hundredths
In French it’s “virgule,” which is the word for comma. So 3,6 would be said “trois virgule six.” Unless I’m horribly wrong, of course.
As Spectre of Pithecanthropus said, the comma is the standard notation here. However we often encounter the point in writing. Among the reasons are non-internationalized software and its output, pocket calculators etc. Even in those cases it is still always spoken as a comma.
In addition to that there is another little difference that Spectre of Pithecanthropus got right but it’s probably not so obvious. We always include the leading zero.
Did he mention how he handles non-terminating decimals?
:smack: :smack: :smack:
Yes, to all those who noticed, I did mean hundreths.
As far as non terminating decimals, I started rambling out a post, but I really don’t know what he would say about that. I’ll have to ask next time I see him.
You’re too clever by nought point five.
That sounds a lot more like him being anal than him being a math major. I’ve been around plenty of math people, and I don’t recall any of them having a problem with “point seven five.” A case could be made that pronouncing it “seventy-five hundredths” is more accurate and more descriptive, but to insist on it is pedantic, sort of like insisting that the year 1968 be pronounced “one thousand nine hundred sixty-eight.”
Well, this is coming from the same guy that insists that 9/9 is very close to, but does not equal, 1. His arguement? 1/9 = .111111…, 2/9 = .2222222…, … , 8/9 = .88888…, 9/9 = .9999999…
oh, no…
without uncovering that old chestnut, your math major friend is simply wrong and will have to come to terms with .9999=1 if he wants to stay a math major.
“.9999**…**. = 1,” that is.