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The French manage to convert between base 20 language and base 10 numerals.

• runarberg 4y ago
  So do the Danish, however the Danish language only counts the 10s in base-20. The 100s, the 1000s, the decimals and so on are still in base-10. So what ends up happening is that the numbers 40-90 are simply numbers with weird names and a perfect mapping to base 10. I don’t know how French count, but perhaps it is similar. This does not appear to be the case with Inuit counting.
• acjohnson55 4y ago
  Not really. French is effectively base-10, but with some vestigial names. English is basically the same -- we say eleven instead of ten-one. The only real difference is that we say eighty instead of quatre-vingt. But neither system maintains any semblance of base-20 beyond that. A more familiar sense of disorientation of language mismatch would be when metric users encounter imperial units and their arbitrary bases.
  • chadlavi 4y ago
    Some dialects of French have a word for 70, 80 and 90!
    • plank 4y ago
      I thought nonante (and septante, octante) were only used in Zwitserland and Belgium? (If true, it would be a bit like saying in some dialects colour is written as color, while the latter is only(?) used in the States?)
      • mejutoco 4y ago
        Both of those examples sound correct to me, yes. Dialects are usually used in particular geographical areas, there is no contradiction there.
  • thaumasiotes 4y ago
    You can get a very close analog by comparing English numbers (base 1,000) to Chinese numbers (base 10,000). The terminology coincides (with a couple asterisks) for numbers below 10,000, but above 10,000 it's essentially impossible to do mental conversion of numbers even though all the digits are the same. Trying to operate simultaneously in a base 20 system and a base 10 system would be much worse than that, since all the digits would be different between representations.