Using fewer syllables to express numbers (opens in new tab)

I’ve settled on “sen” for seven when I want it short.

Zero could also do with being a monosyllable, but at least we have “oh” and “nil” for that.

Then there are letters. 25 of them are monosyllables (though a few like “aitch” and “kyoo” cut it fine), then w (double you) is three syllables, and not even right, it’s double vee.

Unfortunately, once I mysteriously manage to right these two wrongs, power will go to my head, and I’ll go ahead with other spelling reforms and abolishing a few stupid letters like c and x and replacing them with others for all those poor fricatives that have been loaded onto -h digraphs.

And while all that’s going on, I’ll be learning Telugu better, and it will laugh at me with its average of 2.5 syllables per digit.

Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup:

MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC

There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive load of saying it. So native Chinese speakers are much better at it than Spanish.

English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable ... except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause a massive amount of good, when summed over all the times people have to remember numbers.

The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-compatible way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just commit to pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word as se--n), and eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation and codified as standard. As long as the listener is expecting a number there, they will automatically fill in the missing sounds and parse it as a 7.

Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or sen."

Who's with me?

I was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I never had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted that high), it just gets two half-duration notes compared to the others. NBD

Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's wrong with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we would did one eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision, but I forget the triplet division.

The drummers all seemed to have a common syntax for different note length patterns without numbers, which you could probably drop in between numbered beats too.

That reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my "flowstate" playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat with polyrhythms that caught my ear. I tried counting along and realized the primary beat is in 7/8, and in confirming it found myself counting, "one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, one,...".

1. https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbK...

2. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...

In my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a good time signature that accents on a subdivision smaller than an eighth. Can you give an example?

I also don't know any musicians that would count everything. I usually hear "and", "and" "uh", "ee" "and" "uh", etc. between the downbeats and numbers are typically used to count whole notes.

Personally I prefer to use non-numerical word phrases (especially in odd meters) with the right number of syllables instead. If you want to you can even place accents where they're supposed to be with right words.

In French, all numbers between 10 and 15 except 14 are monosyllabic! So, you just might say "dix, onze, douze" and so on. (Quatorze will have to become 'torze or something.)

It helps to count from a as either zero or one (use “o” as zero then) rather than a as ten. Won’t help you with hexadecimal compatibility if you take the former but it should overcome the brain obstacle, and scales up to x/26ths at least.

Given all of music's esoteric conventions and historical vestiges, I'm surprised they don't zero index. Octaves divided into thirds and fifths, who decided that was ok?

I'd reverse the second half and count it as: one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, eight, sev, six, five , four, three, two, one.

If you’re counting it fast, you can run things together a bit:

One, two, three, four, five, six, sev, nate

"Our first priority is to minimize sylliness, but I think our second priority should be to maximize silliness. And 'thirty squared twelfths' is certainly sillier."

Very true, worst case is 2n-1 syllables for n digits.

You got "four thou-sand se-ven hun-dred six-ty-five" :)

Cheating? At least it's still base-10!