"Michael Bell" wrote in message
...
In article , A H
wrote:

I think rhythm is important here, many people break phone Nos into
triplets,
but it's into duplets on the continent.

Sadly on the continent they also say the pairs of digits as if they were a
number between 10 and 99. This is cumbersome in French (98 becomes
"quatre-vignts dix-huit", whereas "neuf huit" would be far simpler) and
downright ludicrous in German where the tens and units are reversed,
four-and-twenty-blackbirds style (98 becomes acht-und-neunzig). I watched
someone in Germany taking down a phone number. His pen took two steps
forwards and one step back for each pair of numbers: hilariously
inefficient!

I tend to break numbers into triplets, but if I knew the number before BT
added extra digits I break it at that point without even thinking about it:
my parents' number used to be 3698 and then was lengthened to 613698:
subconsciously I break this into 61 and 3698 rather than 613 698 ;-)