From reader Ian Duff:
“It is easy to establish that the self-descriptive phrase ‘this phrase contains thirty-five letters’ is the only such one with a correct count. No equivalent is possible in French or German, but in Italian questa frase contiene XX lettere, where XX is a number in word form, again has only one solution.”
What is it?
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The words questa frase contiene lettere contain in total 26 letters, adding venti raises the count to 31, adding trenta raises it to 32, adding quaranta increases it to 34. So venti (or vent for the partial name of 21 or 28) is not feasible, leaving only trenta or quaranta.
Considering the number of letters in the single-digit suffixes uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto and nove (and allowing for the dropping of the final letter of trenta and quaranta when naming 31, 38, 41 and 48), only one match is found for the count in the possible range of 30 to 49:
The self-descriptive phrase questa frase contiene trentasette lettere does indeed contain 37 letters.
(Thanks, Ian.)
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