Originally Posted by Swirlyman

One of my Danish language textbooks has the statement:
"If én is the last component of a numeral it follows the gender of the noun concerned:
tusind og én nat

this phrase relates directly to the fairytales. if you want to say i have slept for 1001 nights, it would be: jeg har sovet i tusind og en nætter

hundrede og ét kilo

this is one of a few nouns that are the same in singular and plural

(N.B. Both nouns are in the singular)."

as you can see, you found one term that has a specific meening, and an other, that is a gramatical "exeption/rarity" in the language.


My first question is, should I infer from the N.B. that all numbers ending with "one" when spoken, i.e. 101, 501, 2001, 3000001, etc. are followed by the singular rather than plural form? So "101 dag" rather than "101 dage", "101 million" rather than "101 millioner", ...

allways plural when more than one.

in the situation when you in english would use the specific form; for example:

on the one hundred and first day i fell asleep, it is, as in english, singular:

på den ethundrede og første dag faldt jeg i søvn.

My second question is, for this same set of numbers, is the long form én/ét always used at the end, or is it used interchangeably with the short form en/et? So, are "hundrede og én" and "hundrede og en" equally said, or does it depend on something?

im not an expert, but i would say, that it does´nt matter much. it´s like the old way of writing, but it´s fully acceptable. if you want to stress the "en/et" a bit, you do that with the "én/ét"