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You put so much effort into that and then totally missed French? four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course. Multiplication and addition required. That being s

You put so much effort into that and then totally missed French? four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course. Multiplication and addition required. That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens"

dstroot 5y ago
Long ago “forty” in English may have begun as “four ten” which most likely became “fourteen” but four tens could have maybe become forty.
- stan_rogers 5y ago
  "Fourteen" (four and ten) would have been from "scoring numbers", where you get to twenty (a score), keep track of the scores separately, and start over. Up to twelve, we used a duodecimal/dozenal system (a separate word for each number). That was also common in other non-Germanic Indo-European languages, notably the Brythonic Celtic languages (and various versions of Brythonic scoring numbers are still used in parts of Britain, depending on the pre-English dialect spoken in the area and changes over time, especially in children's games). French numbering still shows signs of "scoring", especially in the 60/70 and even moreso in the 80/90 region.
jmchuster 5y ago
Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like English, but without the inconsistencies. 4444 = Four thousand, four hundred, four ten, four. Though it is interesting that they group by powers of 10k instead of powers of 1k.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like English, but without the inconsistencies. Not really. "One thousand five" is 1,005 in English, but it's 1500 in Mandarin. For 1005 you'd need to say "one thousand zero five".
  - numpad0 5y ago
    Could that be where “3V3” style notation came from? In electronics, 3V3 means 3.3V, not 3/3V or 3x3V or 3.003V, and likewise 1R5 means 1.5 Ohm. It’s handy but took me a while to get used to.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Don't know; Chinese usage seems unlikely to have been influential in the relevant time period. There is another oddity in Chinese numbers which requires a bit of grammar explanation: Chinese requires measure words when applying numbers to nouns. English has count nouns and mass nouns ("three crackers", where "cracker" is a count noun, versus "three loaves of bread", where "bread" is a mass noun); Chinese has only mass nouns. [1] Thus: 三个人 "three (三) people (人)", with 个 being a measure word appropriate for people 一只狗 "one (一) dog (狗)", with 只 being a measure word appropriate for animals 一首歌 "one song (歌)", with 首 being a measure word appropriate for poetry Most nouns use 个. The oddity is that 半 ("one half") occurs before the measure word when it represents the total amount, but after when it's a modification. 一个小时 "one hour (小时)" 两个小时 "two (两) hours" 半个小时 "half an hour" 一个半小时 "an hour and a half" This also occurs with money, where it's probably the same grammatical rule: 三块 "¥3" 三块二 "¥3.20" But for this to be fully consistent, I'd expect 零个半小时 "zero and a half hours" where in reality 半个小时 is used. [1] Some people have argued that since e.g. "one day" 一天 has no measure word between 一 and 天, 天 must be a noun that requires no measure word. This is wrong; it is a measure word that requires no noun. An easy way to see this is that reduplication carries the same meaning that generally applies to reduplicated measure words, and not the meaning that applies to reduplication of nouns -- 天天 means "every day" in the same way that 个个 means "every [one]"; it does not mean "cute little day" in the same way that 狗狗 means "doggie".
      - novok 5y ago
        Can you just say the measure words like you do in English then? Like "I'll have 3 loaves please". I guess it would be like 三个 or similar? Also thanks for saying that they're equivalent to things like "Schools of fish" or "loaves of bread". They make way more sense to me now!
- didip 5y ago
  Chinese is sweet and consistent until 10,000. They introduced a new word for it, wan(万) instead of 10 x 1000.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    Why is that inconsistent? There are also separate words for 1, 10, 100, and 1,000, so why not 10,000 ?
    - novok 5y ago
      If your number separators are every 3, then it feels weird. If it's every 4, then it does not. Change numbers into 1, 10, 1000, 1'0000 and then it doesn't feel like it's going against your writing habits.
      - pezezin 5y ago
        Dunno about China, but Japan is a weird mix of two systems: - Groups of 4 digits separated by the corresponding power-of-10000 kanji, e.g. 1億2345万6789. Makes sense, I would say it's actually better than just separating the digits, as it makes easier to recognize the size of the number. - Groups of 3 digits separated by commas, e.g. 123,456,789. I asked around how they do to mentally regroup digits by four, and everybody told me that is quite difficult and don't understand why they don't group digits by four. Then again, they have the most difficult writing system in the world and a ridiculous calendar, maybe they just like challenges.
gruez 5y ago
>That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. AFAIK the net effect is that languages with complicated number representations do worse on math tests. >Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens" Can you say that the same about English? ie. four-ty = 4 × 10 edit: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be-counting-in-the-wrong-language https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be...
- frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  >Can you say that the same about English? It's similar but I don't think it qualifies as the same since we do not say "four tens". Forty is a concept in itself, just like suffix -s for plural is a separate concept from singular. Suffixes and prefixes are modifiers. We don't ordinarily say, for example, "many apple", we say "apples".
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    When I say eight-ten in Chinese, my mind is thinking of the singular concept '80', not 8 tens. The same as when I say eight-y in English.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  There was some theory that because the first ten digits in Chinese are very short phonetically that it is easier to keep numbers in your head.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    The first numbers are short in every language. That doesn't distinguish Chinese in any way. Taking some salient examples, in English 9 out of 10 of those numbers are single syllables and 7 is two. In French, all ten are single syllables.
    - 5y ago
jeromegv 5y ago
As a French speaker, you don’t tend to see those as multiplication You associate “quatre vingt” as meaning 80. In your head it’s 80. You don’t think four times twenty. So it’s not as complicated as it looks. I don’t see kids really getting that wrong.
- detaro 5y ago
  As someone who only had basic high-school "French as a third language" and was never good at it, I'd still agree with that. it's one "symbol" so to speak for mental parsing.
- fantod 5y ago
  Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking about because I had never in my life even noticed it. Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply, after all.
- emilecantin 5y ago
  It's even funnier when you're learning multiplications and divisions. We still have to think when we do 4 times 20, and every time we realize it's right there in the name.
- frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  I get that. It's the power of the brain's user of generalizations, i.e., patterns or classes, to represent things. The brain clearly also handles disambiguation far better than we consciously know to do. It seems like the brain essentially has a class named quatre vingt and it has a pattern of 4*20 that resolved to the concept of 80 which means 20+20+20+20. It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the ones that moved to the British isles and became the English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems that those interplays and intersections with the cultures are what determined how French language numbering worked based on when and where and what they had contact with.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Would you call 'four hundred' multiplication? That's a strange way of looking at it for me.
kkylin 5y ago
As a native Mandarin speaker, I don't tend to think of the "ten" as a ten. If anything, for me it conjures up an image of the number of 0s. So, the "hundreds" part in "four hundreds" would just means four followed by two zeros, etc. I may even have been taught this as a child; can't remember. Anyway, no arithmetic involved, at least not explicitly. I don't know that this generalizes -- other Mandarin speakers may have a different experience. I'm really curious how Chinese-speaking people thought about these things before Arabic numerals, but not sure we can ever have a clear answer to that question.
nicoburns 5y ago
> That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. I would say more that simplification makes the boring bits easy and allows the mind to concentrate on more interesting higher-level concepts. As someone who has attended a range of educational institutions for the same courses, one thing that really stood out to me about the "top-level" ones was that there was none of this "life must be hard" attitude. For the core material, the teaching was excellent and designed to make it as easy to learn for students as possible to learn. Then while "lesser" universities were examining students on those core materials (often with questions they'd seen before), the top universities asking novel questions on material that hadn't even been explicitly covered, but which the students could reasonably be expected to answer on because they had a really solid grasp of the core stuff.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "life must be hard" Ah yes, this is very german. If it is not a grind, it is not really work you are doing. And it is still kind of a honor badge to moan about how little you sleep, as this shows how hard you are working all day and the ones sleeping the most less, are the hardest. (But I do see some healthy change in that regard)
  - DenisM 5y ago
    > the ones sleeping the most less Good god, this is beautiful. Is this a German idiom?
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Not literally, as far as I know (I am also still wondering, of whether it was correct grammar), but there are plenty of: "Morgenstund hat gold im Mund" morning time is gold (to which I agree at times) or "Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm" The early bird catches the worm. (to where I say, maybe the worm should have slept in that day)
      - 5y ago
throwaway894345 5y ago
French is definitely weird in that it introduces multiplication, but the addition operands are still in descending order as with English. > I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring Probably not much. I doubt francophones are doing multiplication when they think of the number 80 any more than anglophones do addition when we think of the number 14. Rather, speakers presumably both memorize the names of each number and move on with life.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
No, it is a word like ananas or worm, an image in your head. Nobody in France would do any multiplication, it is just a word. We have a weird language ('eaux' is 'o', imagine that?) but this is not one of the crazy things.
truculent 5y ago
A trivial aside: English used to have something similar in a "score" being 20. So "four-score and ten" would be 90, not too dissimilar from the French.
- FroshKiller 5y ago
  English still has it. Nobody took it away. It's still in use.
  - FascistDonut 5y ago
    How? What is a common modern day use?
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      I think it's still used a bit in British English, along with other things that strike the American ear as archaic like 'stones' and 'fortnights'.
    - FroshKiller 5y ago
      The same meaning of a group of twenty. "There must have been a score of cars at the drive-thru." It hasn't changed.
      - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
        It's barely ever used nowadays though, whilst 30 years ago you'd hear it occasionally, similar to a gross, or things being referred to in yards. It's changed IMO. I think it's part of how we've tended to remove dialect and en-gb terms as we've more intra-UK mixing and more non-UK born residents?
        FroshKiller 5y ago
        You might not hear it often, but that doesn't mean it's barely used. English is spoken by more than just English people. I reckon I hear "score" used in the sense of twenty of something than I hear words you'd probably describe as more common, such as "laden" or "bereft."
gknapp 5y ago
It's easy to pick on the weirdness of french numbers, but honestly "quatre-vingt" ends up just being a word like "eighty" in its own right. No French speaker is multiplying 20s in their head. Probably the only true weirdness is the 70s and 90s because they use the teen words like douze and treize, but that's honestly where the weirdness ends, and larger numbers follow very consistent rules.
yodsanklai 5y ago
> four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as ninety. Nobody thinks about this in term of 4 * 20 + 10. Although, I remember that it confused me a little bit when I learned how to count. That being said, I'd be in favour to switch to the Swiss/Belgian/Canadian way and replace "quatre vingt dix" by "nonante".
- monsieurgaufre 5y ago
  I'm a french canadian and I've never in my life heard someone use "septante/octante/nonante". I understand the difficulty while learning French but, as a native speaker, we don't even think about it.
- belval 5y ago
  Sad fact: French Canadian don't use the (much better) Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante and the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch. It's a shame because soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix are confusing to write (I probably made a mistake somewhere).
  - glandium 5y ago
    Note that Belgians ans Swiss don't agree on 80. It's huitante on one side and octante on the other (but I don't remember which is which)
    - belval 5y ago
      Interesting, I knew Swiss said octante and my Belgian friends all say octante as well. Perhaps it's a regional thing?
      - Biganon 5y ago
        Swiss person here. This "octante" idea needs to die. In my 30 years in French speaking Switzerland, I've never heard or read "octante" ONCE. It might be used in Belgium, but I'm not even sure about that.
alisonkisk 5y ago
And English: "six-teen" (six and ten) and "Eight-y-Seven" (eight times ten, plus seven)
robbedpeter 5y ago
>>Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. Citation needed? Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. Removing complexity is difficult. Einstein, Feynman, Newton, and innumerable others are lauded for simplifying enormously complex ideas to the point of comprehension by the masses. Oversimplifying is bad, because it implies lost information. Simplification itself is a form of sophisticated articulation. More efficient representations of numbers are generally associated with better performance in math, historically. Roman numerals being a prime example of unnecessary complexity, compared to the maths being done by Indian people, and so on. Civilization tends to abandon conventions that are superseded in advantage. Making things more difficult to formulate for structural reasons unrelated to the problem at hand is inefficient. Having inefficient numbering in language is wasted energy at best.
- bhk 5y ago
  > Simplification is itself an act of intelligence Obfuscation is an act of counterintelligence.
- markdown 5y ago
  > Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. For the people who simplified things (Einstein, Feynman, Newton). For anyone who never had to learn or have anything to do with the more complicated system before it was simplified, it most certainly isn't an act of intelligence.
  - marchingtomars 5y ago
    Wouldn't take the word on "intelligence" from someone who ignorantly conflates Alex Jones with Dr. Tyrone Hayes [1]. You sir, sound most unintelligent, arrogant, and most uninformed (Except by approved media sources-- I'm sure you accept everything hook, line, and sinker without critical analysis) [1] https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/tyrone-b-hayes https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/tyrone-b-hayes
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  Indeed! "I wanted to write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time"
rozab 5y ago
>Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens" This is exactly what forty means, except it goes back to the Proto-Germanic fedwōr tigiwiz and so the meaning is obfuscated. Much simpler to use the same word, no?
philjohn 5y ago
Interestingly, the dialect of French spoken in Belgium has a name for 90 - nonante. They still use quatre vignt for 80 though.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
> 40 is "4 tens" so is "forty", optimized for quick pronunciation, a respelling of four tens. I've never understood how Russian 40 is sorok, nor have i ever gotten an explanation, including from Russians, whereas the rest works like english, etc.
pronik 5y ago
To be fair, it's a matter of language development and evolution. "Four score and seven years ago" is essentially the same thing, just a couple of hundred years ago, the French just kept it in the language.

dstroot 5y ago

Long ago “forty” in English may have begun as “four ten” which most likely became “fourteen” but four tens could have maybe become forty.

stan_rogers 5y ago
"Fourteen" (four and ten) would have been from "scoring numbers", where you get to twenty (a score), keep track of the scores separately, and start over. Up to twelve, we used a duodecimal/dozenal system (a separate word for each number). That was also common in other non-Germanic Indo-European languages, notably the Brythonic Celtic languages (and various versions of Brythonic scoring numbers are still used in parts of Britain, depending on the pre-English dialect spoken in the area and changes over time, especially in children's games). French numbering still shows signs of "scoring", especially in the 60/70 and even moreso in the 80/90 region.

jmchuster 5y ago

Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like English, but without the inconsistencies. 4444 = Four thousand, four hundred, four ten, four. Though it is interesting that they group by powers of 10k instead of powers of 1k.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Chinese (and derivatives) basically just count like English, but without the inconsistencies. Not really. "One thousand five" is 1,005 in English, but it's 1500 in Mandarin. For 1005 you'd need to say "one thousand zero five".
- numpad0 5y ago
  Could that be where “3V3” style notation came from? In electronics, 3V3 means 3.3V, not 3/3V or 3x3V or 3.003V, and likewise 1R5 means 1.5 Ohm. It’s handy but took me a while to get used to.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Don't know; Chinese usage seems unlikely to have been influential in the relevant time period. There is another oddity in Chinese numbers which requires a bit of grammar explanation: Chinese requires measure words when applying numbers to nouns. English has count nouns and mass nouns ("three crackers", where "cracker" is a count noun, versus "three loaves of bread", where "bread" is a mass noun); Chinese has only mass nouns. [1] Thus: 三个人 "three (三) people (人)", with 个 being a measure word appropriate for people 一只狗 "one (一) dog (狗)", with 只 being a measure word appropriate for animals 一首歌 "one song (歌)", with 首 being a measure word appropriate for poetry Most nouns use 个. The oddity is that 半 ("one half") occurs before the measure word when it represents the total amount, but after when it's a modification. 一个小时 "one hour (小时)" 两个小时 "two (两) hours" 半个小时 "half an hour" 一个半小时 "an hour and a half" This also occurs with money, where it's probably the same grammatical rule: 三块 "¥3" 三块二 "¥3.20" But for this to be fully consistent, I'd expect 零个半小时 "zero and a half hours" where in reality 半个小时 is used. [1] Some people have argued that since e.g. "one day" 一天 has no measure word between 一 and 天, 天 must be a noun that requires no measure word. This is wrong; it is a measure word that requires no noun. An easy way to see this is that reduplication carries the same meaning that generally applies to reduplicated measure words, and not the meaning that applies to reduplication of nouns -- 天天 means "every day" in the same way that 个个 means "every [one]"; it does not mean "cute little day" in the same way that 狗狗 means "doggie".
    - novok 5y ago
      Can you just say the measure words like you do in English then? Like "I'll have 3 loaves please". I guess it would be like 三个 or similar? Also thanks for saying that they're equivalent to things like "Schools of fish" or "loaves of bread". They make way more sense to me now!
didip 5y ago
Chinese is sweet and consistent until 10,000. They introduced a new word for it, wan(万) instead of 10 x 1000.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  Why is that inconsistent? There are also separate words for 1, 10, 100, and 1,000, so why not 10,000 ?
  - novok 5y ago
    If your number separators are every 3, then it feels weird. If it's every 4, then it does not. Change numbers into 1, 10, 1000, 1'0000 and then it doesn't feel like it's going against your writing habits.
    - pezezin 5y ago
      Dunno about China, but Japan is a weird mix of two systems: - Groups of 4 digits separated by the corresponding power-of-10000 kanji, e.g. 1億2345万6789. Makes sense, I would say it's actually better than just separating the digits, as it makes easier to recognize the size of the number. - Groups of 3 digits separated by commas, e.g. 123,456,789. I asked around how they do to mentally regroup digits by four, and everybody told me that is quite difficult and don't understand why they don't group digits by four. Then again, they have the most difficult writing system in the world and a ridiculous calendar, maybe they just like challenges.

gruez 5y ago

>That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. AFAIK the net effect is that languages with complicated number representations do worse on math tests. >Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens" Can you say that the same about English? ie. four-ty = 4 × 10 edit: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be-counting-in-the-wrong-language https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be...

frankfrankfrank 5y ago
>Can you say that the same about English? It's similar but I don't think it qualifies as the same since we do not say "four tens". Forty is a concept in itself, just like suffix -s for plural is a separate concept from singular. Suffixes and prefixes are modifiers. We don't ordinarily say, for example, "many apple", we say "apples".
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  When I say eight-ten in Chinese, my mind is thinking of the singular concept '80', not 8 tens. The same as when I say eight-y in English.
jacquesm 5y ago
There was some theory that because the first ten digits in Chinese are very short phonetically that it is easier to keep numbers in your head.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  The first numbers are short in every language. That doesn't distinguish Chinese in any way. Taking some salient examples, in English 9 out of 10 of those numbers are single syllables and 7 is two. In French, all ten are single syllables.
  - 5y ago

jeromegv 5y ago

As a French speaker, you don’t tend to see those as multiplication You associate “quatre vingt” as meaning 80. In your head it’s 80. You don’t think four times twenty. So it’s not as complicated as it looks. I don’t see kids really getting that wrong.

detaro 5y ago
As someone who only had basic high-school "French as a third language" and was never good at it, I'd still agree with that. it's one "symbol" so to speak for mental parsing.
fantod 5y ago
Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking about because I had never in my life even noticed it. Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply, after all.
emilecantin 5y ago
It's even funnier when you're learning multiplications and divisions. We still have to think when we do 4 times 20, and every time we realize it's right there in the name.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I get that. It's the power of the brain's user of generalizations, i.e., patterns or classes, to represent things. The brain clearly also handles disambiguation far better than we consciously know to do. It seems like the brain essentially has a class named quatre vingt and it has a pattern of 4*20 that resolved to the concept of 80 which means 20+20+20+20. It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the ones that moved to the British isles and became the English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems that those interplays and intersections with the cultures are what determined how French language numbering worked based on when and where and what they had contact with.

tsimionescu 5y ago

Would you call 'four hundred' multiplication? That's a strange way of looking at it for me.

kkylin 5y ago

As a native Mandarin speaker, I don't tend to think of the "ten" as a ten. If anything, for me it conjures up an image of the number of 0s. So, the "hundreds" part in "four hundreds" would just means four followed by two zeros, etc. I may even have been taught this as a child; can't remember. Anyway, no arithmetic involved, at least not explicitly. I don't know that this generalizes -- other Mandarin speakers may have a different experience. I'm really curious how Chinese-speaking people thought about these things before Arabic numerals, but not sure we can ever have a clear answer to that question.

nicoburns 5y ago

> That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. I would say more that simplification makes the boring bits easy and allows the mind to concentrate on more interesting higher-level concepts. As someone who has attended a range of educational institutions for the same courses, one thing that really stood out to me about the "top-level" ones was that there was none of this "life must be hard" attitude. For the core material, the teaching was excellent and designed to make it as easy to learn for students as possible to learn. Then while "lesser" universities were examining students on those core materials (often with questions they'd seen before), the top universities asking novel questions on material that hadn't even been explicitly covered, but which the students could reasonably be expected to answer on because they had a really solid grasp of the core stuff.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"life must be hard" Ah yes, this is very german. If it is not a grind, it is not really work you are doing. And it is still kind of a honor badge to moan about how little you sleep, as this shows how hard you are working all day and the ones sleeping the most less, are the hardest. (But I do see some healthy change in that regard)
- DenisM 5y ago
  > the ones sleeping the most less Good god, this is beautiful. Is this a German idiom?
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    Not literally, as far as I know (I am also still wondering, of whether it was correct grammar), but there are plenty of: "Morgenstund hat gold im Mund" morning time is gold (to which I agree at times) or "Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm" The early bird catches the worm. (to where I say, maybe the worm should have slept in that day)
    - 5y ago

throwaway894345 5y ago

French is definitely weird in that it introduces multiplication, but the addition operands are still in descending order as with English. > I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring Probably not much. I doubt francophones are doing multiplication when they think of the number 80 any more than anglophones do addition when we think of the number 14. Rather, speakers presumably both memorize the names of each number and move on with life.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

No, it is a word like ananas or worm, an image in your head. Nobody in France would do any multiplication, it is just a word. We have a weird language ('eaux' is 'o', imagine that?) but this is not one of the crazy things.

truculent 5y ago

A trivial aside: English used to have something similar in a "score" being 20. So "four-score and ten" would be 90, not too dissimilar from the French.

FroshKiller 5y ago
English still has it. Nobody took it away. It's still in use.
- FascistDonut 5y ago
  How? What is a common modern day use?
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    I think it's still used a bit in British English, along with other things that strike the American ear as archaic like 'stones' and 'fortnights'.
  - FroshKiller 5y ago
    The same meaning of a group of twenty. "There must have been a score of cars at the drive-thru." It hasn't changed.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      It's barely ever used nowadays though, whilst 30 years ago you'd hear it occasionally, similar to a gross, or things being referred to in yards. It's changed IMO. I think it's part of how we've tended to remove dialect and en-gb terms as we've more intra-UK mixing and more non-UK born residents?
      - FroshKiller 5y ago
        You might not hear it often, but that doesn't mean it's barely used. English is spoken by more than just English people. I reckon I hear "score" used in the sense of twenty of something than I hear words you'd probably describe as more common, such as "laden" or "bereft."

gknapp 5y ago

It's easy to pick on the weirdness of french numbers, but honestly "quatre-vingt" ends up just being a word like "eighty" in its own right. No French speaker is multiplying 20s in their head. Probably the only true weirdness is the 70s and 90s because they use the teen words like douze and treize, but that's honestly where the weirdness ends, and larger numbers follow very consistent rules.

yodsanklai 5y ago

> four-twenty-ten-seven … yup, 97, of course As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as ninety. Nobody thinks about this in term of 4 * 20 + 10. Although, I remember that it confused me a little bit when I learned how to count. That being said, I'd be in favour to switch to the Swiss/Belgian/Canadian way and replace "quatre vingt dix" by "nonante".

monsieurgaufre 5y ago
I'm a french canadian and I've never in my life heard someone use "septante/octante/nonante". I understand the difficulty while learning French but, as a native speaker, we don't even think about it.
belval 5y ago
Sad fact: French Canadian don't use the (much better) Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante and the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch. It's a shame because soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix are confusing to write (I probably made a mistake somewhere).
- glandium 5y ago
  Note that Belgians ans Swiss don't agree on 80. It's huitante on one side and octante on the other (but I don't remember which is which)
  - belval 5y ago
    Interesting, I knew Swiss said octante and my Belgian friends all say octante as well. Perhaps it's a regional thing?
    - Biganon 5y ago
      Swiss person here. This "octante" idea needs to die. In my 30 years in French speaking Switzerland, I've never heard or read "octante" ONCE. It might be used in Belgium, but I'm not even sure about that.

alisonkisk 5y ago

And English: "six-teen" (six and ten) and "Eight-y-Seven" (eight times ten, plus seven)

robbedpeter 5y ago

>>Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind. Citation needed? Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. Removing complexity is difficult. Einstein, Feynman, Newton, and innumerable others are lauded for simplifying enormously complex ideas to the point of comprehension by the masses. Oversimplifying is bad, because it implies lost information. Simplification itself is a form of sophisticated articulation. More efficient representations of numbers are generally associated with better performance in math, historically. Roman numerals being a prime example of unnecessary complexity, compared to the maths being done by Indian people, and so on. Civilization tends to abandon conventions that are superseded in advantage. Making things more difficult to formulate for structural reasons unrelated to the problem at hand is inefficient. Having inefficient numbering in language is wasted energy at best.

bhk 5y ago
> Simplification is itself an act of intelligence Obfuscation is an act of counterintelligence.
markdown 5y ago
> Simplification is itself an act of intelligence. For the people who simplified things (Einstein, Feynman, Newton). For anyone who never had to learn or have anything to do with the more complicated system before it was simplified, it most certainly isn't an act of intelligence.
- marchingtomars 5y ago
  Wouldn't take the word on "intelligence" from someone who ignorantly conflates Alex Jones with Dr. Tyrone Hayes [1]. You sir, sound most unintelligent, arrogant, and most uninformed (Except by approved media sources-- I'm sure you accept everything hook, line, and sinker without critical analysis) [1] https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/tyrone-b-hayes https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/tyrone-b-hayes
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Indeed! "I wanted to write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time"

rozab 5y ago

>Chinese Mandarin isn't quite as challenging, but they too essentially use multiplication 40 is "4 tens" This is exactly what forty means, except it goes back to the Proto-Germanic fedwōr tigiwiz and so the meaning is obfuscated. Much simpler to use the same word, no?

philjohn 5y ago

Interestingly, the dialect of French spoken in Belgium has a name for 90 - nonante. They still use quatre vignt for 80 though.

jjtheblunt 5y ago

> 40 is "4 tens" so is "forty", optimized for quick pronunciation, a respelling of four tens. I've never understood how Russian 40 is sorok, nor have i ever gotten an explanation, including from Russians, whereas the rest works like english, etc.

pronik 5y ago

To be fair, it's a matter of language development and evolution. "Four score and seven years ago" is essentially the same thing, just a couple of hundred years ago, the French just kept it in the language.