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How?
You probably have figured it
out already if you tried the above form for a couple of things. If not
try a few more before you read on.
The trick is that you look
at how many characters a word contains. E.g. everything contains
ten characters. Ten contains three characters. Hence ten is three. Three
again, consists of five characters. Five uses the magic number of four
characters. Four has four characters and is thus  .
It is as simple as that.
It works because four is the only number with the same number of characters
as it's value. All the other values converge to four at a given point.
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Other languages
Works
English isn't the only language
this works with. It also works in Dutch
(vier = 4) this is also the language I heard of it originally since I'm
Dutch :) and German (vier =
4). See 0 to 100 in English,
Dutch or German.
I received an e-mail from Doron Seijffers who pointed out to me that everything is also ארבע = 4 in Hebrew, thank you Doron. See 0 to 100 in Hebrew.
Kind of
works
It works kind of in Croatian,
Czech and Italian,
but everything in any of these languages is 3 (= tri, tri and tre). See
0 to 100 in Croatian, Czech
or Italian.
Doesn't works
There are also some languages (in alphabetic order) in which it doesn't
work at all.
In Danish everything is either
2(=to), 3(=tre) or 4(=fire). See
0 to 100 in Danish. Tnx to Karsten Jensen who mailed me the
Danish word for 0 which wasn't in my old Danish/Dutch dictionary :). Also tnx to Christian Ravn who pointed out that you write the Danish counting words as one word. (e.g. syvoghalvtreds not syv og halvtreds).
new! For a moment Jari. T. and I thought that everything in Finnish was 5. Unfortunately we then noticed that you often end up in an endless loop between 8 (kahdeksan) and 9 (yhdeksän). Thank you Jari T. for letting me know the counting words in Finnish! See 0 to 100 in Finnish
In French you'll end up in
a rather long loop since 4 (quatre) => 6 (six) => 3 (trois) =>
5 (cinq) => 4 (quatre). See
0 to 100 in French.
I used to have Hungarian
listed as a langauge where everything was 4 (= negy), but Tamas Tenyei
who is Hungarian pointed out to me that you often end in a loop between
5 (öt) and 2 (kettö), which I failed to notice while I was checking
the Hungarian dictionary.
(Thank you Tamas for letting me know). See
0 to 100 in Hungarian.
In Polish it doesn't work either.
4 (cztery) => 6 (szesc) => 5 (piec) => 4 (cztery). See
0 to 100 in Polish.
In Portuguese also ends in
a loop, altough only between 6 (seis) and 4 (quatro). See
0 to 100 in Portuguese.
In Russian 4 (=I think my keyboard
is broken 'cause I can't find the Russian characters on my keyboard ;-)
has 7 characters and 7 has 4 characters). You are eventually stuck in
an endless loop.
In Spanish everything is either
5 (=cinco) or you end up in an endless loop between 4 (=quatro) and 6
(=seis). See 0
to 100 in Spanish.
In Swedish everything is either
3 (=tre) or 4 (=fyra) which makes it a bit hard to decide. See
0 to 100 in Swedish.
Everything in Turkish
finally loops between 3 (=üç) and 2 (=iki) which prevents
it from ever becoming four. See
0 to 100 in Turkish.
That are all the languages
of which I have a small pocket dictionary. If you know of any other languages
where everything is 4 (or not), please let me
know.
I tried to be as precise and accurate as possible, but as you can see from the revisions, my inferences from the dictonaries aren't always 100% correct. So if you happen to spot a mistake, please let me know.
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Why this page?
This page has two (sorry, I
mean four) purposes:
First: This page is a test for me to find out how long it takes
to design and implement a simple website (How can you give a meaning to
the an useless activity?).
Second: During my frequent surfing activities, I encountered many
pages of which I thought "What the H@L is the use of this page?". Secretly
I always wanted one of those useless pages for myself.
Third: I found four a funny subject.
Fourth: While trying this four business out on school with some
friends, I told them this would be just an excellent idea for a non-purpose
website.
(The last two reasons are just to make everything four :) This is just
another useless page on the internet, but I hope you like it.)
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Links and sources
I used the following websites,
and a load of dictionaries, as reference for making this site.
Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 4500 Languages: http://zompist.com/numbers.shtml
SmartPhrase.com Online Phrasebook: http://www.smartphrase.com/
This last site has nothing
to do with numbers or four, but it's one I made myself and is pretty useless
too and I'm shamelessly promoting it here, so go visit: www.smiling-faces.com.
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