"Chris" wrote in message
...
NY wrote:
French falls foul of ambiguity because of its quatre-vignts notation for
80:
quatre vignts dix could be any of:

quatre-vignts-dix-huit (98)
quatre-vignts dix-huit (80 18)

A pause makes all the difference. I imagine that French speakers make a
very
exaggerated pause in the second case to avoid ambiguity, whereas almost
no
pause is needed between non-ambiguous pairs such as vignt-huit
trente-quatre
(28 34).

The pause is almost imperceptible, but it is there. It helps in france
that
all phone numbers are 10 digits long so any mistranscription is obvious.

Though it doesn't help if you are keying the digits as you (think you) hear
them, rather than writing it down, validating the number of digits and any
non-permitted combinations, and then dialling.

The grouping into twos or threes is fairly immaterial, but I can't
understand where the convention arose to read out phone numbers with
hundreds, tens and units weighting to the digits in each group "one hundred
and thirty seven" rather than "one two three". Especially for German or
Dutch where the tens and units are reversed (one extra stage of
disentangling).

As a matter of interest, what is the convention in France, Germany etc for
reading out other streams of digits such as credit card numbers, electricity
or gas account numbers etc - are those grouped into twos and read out as
tens-and-units? Or are they read out as separate digits, with a pause every
two or three digits?