7 ms·
It's still no match for French numbers: quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten) for 90.
by folli 5y ago
It's still no match for French numbers: quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten) for 90.
- ginko 5y agoOr Danish where 90 is halvfems or (5 - 1/2) * 20
- hjek 5y ago... which is especially embarrassing because they got rid of the problem in Swedish and Norwegian.
- daneel_w 5y agoWith one small exception in Swedish. We still do it backwards for some numbers in the 10-19 range. 13 = tretton (three ten), 14 = fjorton (four ten), and so on.
- Symbiote 5y ago95 could be spoken as "fifteen and four score" in English, and I'm told my great grandfather did this, though people thought he was old fashioned. It would not be the Danish "five and half the fifth score" though. This is crazy.
- xwolfi 5y agoYeah but I'd never blame someone for telling me "nonante", the Belgian (and more correct latin) variant.
- Bud 5y agoFrench is not actually that weird; it's just weird from 80-99. From 10-79, it's just like English handles it. They just never came up with single words for 80 and 90.
- MauranKilom 5y agoIt's also weird for 50-59. English does not say "fourty twelve" ("quarante-douze").
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agoNeither does French, you're confusing 50 with 70. https://frm.wiktionary.org/wiki/quarante-douze https://frm.wiktionary.org/wiki/quarante-douze Edit: 50, not 60.
- bramjans 5y agoAt least in Belgium we fixed that with "septante"
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agoBut making things completely logical would have been too much for us so we kept quatre-vingt.
- Lamad123 5y agoIt's weird form 70-79 as well! To say 79, you need to say sixty-ten-nine!
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agoBut they actually did! Septante, huitant/octante and nonante are real French words. Only the French don't want to use them.
- GistNoesis 5y agoNote that you cannot use heptante for septante.
- smoe 5y agoI think various french speaking regions outside France do use single words for those. E.g. in neighboring Switzerland I learned 70, 80, and 90 as septante, huitante and nonante if I remember correctly (I'm from the german speaking part)
- orthoxerox 5y ago> Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation
- Lamad123 5y agononante!
- dan-robertson 5y agoThere’s a joke in French: What is 20*4? Answer: 80 because multiplication is commutative.
- Koshkin 5y agoYet, Commutative Algebra is a German invention.