I just read a riddle and I am not ablre to understand its answer.


Can someone explain how the answer can be deduced?

very poorly worded; four is the only number, expressed as an English word, with the same number of letters as its value.
-joe (four has four (count 'em) letters) friday

Thank you but it must be beyond my English. I still can not see how that answer is suggested by the question. I searched on google and the same phrasing is used repeadtedly except sometimes the word puzzle is used instead of question.

You have to figure out an answer that tells you how many letters are in the answer.
7 wouldn't work because the answer (seven) has 5 letters. The number of letters does not agree with the word.
5 has 4 letters (five) so it doesn't work.

The only number in which the word (the answer) tells you how many letters it has is four.

PS I can figure it out in reverse I would never have gotten it on my own.

You mean like octobass? link

The classic riddle would often be obscurely, if not misleadingly, worded.

Q. How many letters are there in the correct answer to this question?

A. 0

A. There are twenty-five letters.

A. One possible answer to this question is that there are fifty.

Q. How many letters are there in the correct answer to this question?

A. Four.

this is a self-referential construct, as are doc_comfort's examples.

Q. How many consonants are in the correct answer to this question?
A. one
or,
A. two
or,
A. three

this is a variation, of sorts, on the "this sentence" theme:
1. This sentence contains five words.
2. This sentence no verb.
3. This sentence is false.

-joe (autological) friday

You'll want to be careful with this one. You might face the wrath of Geoff Pullum. He'll come down on you with both feet and a prepositional bush. Linguistically one has two consonants, two has one and three has two.

But it seems to me that, protests of the academic linguistic world notwithstanding, most people in normal spoken or written English are pretty comfortable using the word "consonant" to refer directly to written letters of the alphabet.
-Craig Russell (from your link)

1. An alphabetic or phonetic element other than a vowel; an elementary sound of speech which in the formation of a syllable is combined with a vowel. Applied both to the sounds and to the letters (the latter being the historically prior use).
[OED2]

-joe (bring it on, Geoff) friday

Even so, W is often said, in a non-linguistic sense, to be either a vowel or a consonant. Clearly in two it is a vowel.

A Vowelsonant?

maybe. it depends on how it's taught -- 'w' is called either a semi-vowel, a semi-consonant, or a glide... the sound of the 'w' in two is a back glide related to the sound 'oo' (as in boo). some will still insist that the only words (in English) where the w is a vowel are cwm and crwth (from Welsh). then again, some will now insist that the 'w' in two is (part of) a dipthong.

ymmv.

edit: I found this claim online, fwiw:
I found two word where the 'W' comes before the partner vowel. (1) geo·duck also gwe·duc (gōō'ē-dŭk') n. A very large, edible clam of the Pacific coast of northwest North America, (2) two [too]

I've reread this thread a few times and riddle + aswer still ring no bell at all. To me it looks like empty nonsense too in spite of all efforts to give it a meaning.

The question is "How many..." This means the answer will be a number. So it boils down to what number has the same number of letters as the number it means. The only number in English that satisfies that condition is four. In, e.g., German the answer could be vier or, if you spell it with a ue rather than ü, fuenf would also work, so there wouldn't be a unique answer in German. Dunno about Nederlands.

Ah...I see. That is, now I see what I do not understand about this riddle.
To me it appears that the question is not "How many....", but " How many letters are there in the correct answer to this question?" I cannot follow the logic of it. It's not a matter of language. When I translate it it's just the same. Must admit I'm no good with riddles or crypto's in general.

it's clever, in an "I'm smarter and cleverer than you" pain in the ass annoying kind of way.

Why, that's the first time I've heard lack of understanding called 'clever '. I try to understand.

Correct me if I'm wrong, et, but I believe, Bran, that the "clever" appellation is referring to the riddle, not to you. I think he's trying to say that someone who would ask such a riddle is trying to be [or at least perceived as] clever, when s/he is actually a pain in the ass annoying... :0)

exactly! thanks, two, and sorry Bran, for the misunderstanding. ((hug))

Thanks twosleepy, for being attentive to misunderstandings and thanks etaoin for understanding my misunderstanding.

You're very welcome, Bran! I couldn't stand a dust-up between two of my favorite peeps for no good reason... you're both too nice! :0)

How many letters are there in the correct answer? Well--despite the explanations, I still want to say, "What question?" However--IMHO, the answer could also be "unknown", because what if the question is referring to a post office drop box?
I also see absolutely NO connection between the correct answer and the "fact" that the answer has to have the same number of letters as the number it spells. It's just weird to me.