> I've seen this claim several times about French. Who said it was about modern French? French has been heavily influenced by different cultures. Some apparen

> I've seen this claim several times about French. Who said it was about modern French? French has been heavily influenced by different cultures. Some apparently used full or partial vigesimal systems such as in Basque, Breton, Normans, maybe Gaulish too. And some others like the Roman, Saxon were mostly decimal systems. There are examples in French literature of the Middle Ages of numerals based on twenty (30 was (20+10) "vingt et dix", 40 was (2×20) "deux vingt", 50 was ((2×20)+10) "deux vingt et dix", 60 was (3×20) "trois vingt", etc). One of the most famous vestigial example is the "Hospice des Quinze-Vingts" (15×20) founded in 1260 in Paris and was intended to house 300 patients. That system was progressively replaced by decimal system at the end of Middle Ages, and most of the etymology can be now related to latin and a bit of greek. Still currently in France numbers from 80 to 99 seems to follow the old system : 80 is (4×20) "quatre-vingt", and 90 is (4×20)+10 "quatre-vingt dix".