Geoff Shang wrote: > We've hit a problem though that I thought we would hit, that of grammar.
In addition to what I've previously written, I just took a look at the prompts we're yet to record and I've discovered that we're going to get into trouble when we get to doing numbers. First, in Hebrew you don't say "twenty four", you say "twenty and four". Add to that the fact that there are three types of "and" in Hebrew, and different ones are used for different numbers. So the "and" in "twenty and four" is different from that in "twenty and eight", for example. While I think about it, my memories of primary school Germon tell me that German speakers say "four and twenty" ... but I digress. MOre fun happens when we get to 100. In Hebrew, you don't say "one hundred", you say "hundred" (i.e. the singular form of the term "hundred" with no accompanying "one"). Likewise, 200 hundred is not "two hundred" but a special plural form of "hundred" which only applies to 200 (possibly you could describe it as "double hundred" or "dual hundred"). Only when you get to 300 do you start including numbers of hundreds, and here you say "three hundreds". If you wanted to be a stickler for accuracy in pronunciation however, you'd have separate entries for each hundred all the way up to 900, as the forms of the numbers 3 through 9 are not the same as for the individual digits 3-9. The exact same situation applies to thousand as to hundred, though I am not sure exactly what happens when you get to ten thousand. And I've no idea about millions (I haven't needed to know yet). And time is completely different. You say "the hour <X>" for the top of the hour, "the hour <X> and minute 1" for 1 after the hour, "the hour <x> and <y> minutes" for y=2-10, 20, 30, 40 and 50, and "The hour <x> and <y>" for all other occurrences. I think this is all correct. I've copied my wife on these messages so I'll post any corrections I get to any of this. Geoff. _______________________________________________ Callweaver-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.callweaver.org/mailman/listinfo/callweaver-dev
