Hacker News Reader

Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

I thank the French for the metric system. But their numbers between 70 and 100 are bonkers.

70 is pronunced "60 10". 71 is "60 11". And so on until 80, which is pronounced, obviously, "4 20". 81 is "4 20 1". It goes up to 90, which is "4 20 10". 91 is "4 20 11". The craziness continues until 100, which is, thankfully, a different word ("cent", instead of "4 20 20", or, dear lord, "60 40"). But in 170 it all comes back.

I think the French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Canada did the right thing when they replaced all that complexity by dedicated words for 70, 80 and 90.

View on HN

Danish has a similar madness going on.

66 is "six and three twenties" 77 is "seven and half four twenties"

I've been told that Danish accountants use Swedish or Norwegian numbers to avoid mistakes.

https://blogs.transparent.com/danish/2011/09/14/counting-in-...

66 is seks-og-tres, i.e. seks (6) og (and/+) tres (60). The latter is technically "tresindstyve" (which is similar to the French, 3x20), but I can guarantee you that the number of people who actually know and care about that is infinitesimal. Additionally, "tres" is not really a word that can be mistaken for another number word. What usually screws people over is pronunciation and thus "tredive" vs "tretten" which sound shockingly similar in Danish.

(This happens a lot in Danish. It's incredibly sloppy on pronunciation and people somehow mostly still understand each other.)

EDIT: I had to think about it for a bit, but the situation for 77 is actually equivalent. No speaker of Danish actually thinks about "halvfjerds" as a compound number -- it just "70". I suspect it's actually very similar for French speakers, but their hyphens do make it harder to just lump the thing into a single concept/number :).

Canada uses the same numbers as France. Only Belgium and Switzerland use other words for 70 and 90, and just a few parts of French-speaking Switzerland use huitante for 80, but most say quatre-vingt like in France.

Yup can concur it is like that in Canada. I never understood it. The 10's are weird two. Onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze and seize for 11-16(sorry the spelling's likely wrong.) Then dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf(10 7, 10 8 10 9) for 17-19. Then the 20's and up just the 10's column number style.

That's funny. I learned French from a Belgian woman and I called 80 "octante" until I was formally taught French and switched to quatre-vingt to avoid sounding like a hick.

Did I somehow come up with "octante"? Is it not used in Belgium, or anywhere else? It's true that it sounds a lot more Greek (my native language) than "huitante".

Octante was taught for a while in France at the beginning of the 20th century, but it never really caught on. Old people in Brittany used to use it sometimes as well, but it has completely disappeared everywhere now. It does sound nicer and more natural to me than huitante.

Many French people believe that it is used in Belgium and Switzerland though, for some reason, but as far as I know that's not true (I live in Belgium, although not in a French speaking region).

Thanks. At least I know I didn't imagine it.

I make a disservice to Pascale, the first lady who taught me French, and who was, herself French, by saying it was a Belgian woman who taught me French. The Belgian lady, Catherine, taught me _most_ of my French but I first started speaking French with Pascale.

Which is to say, it's possible I learned "octante" from Pascale, although she was far from old enough to have learned it in the early 20th century.

So I'm guessing "octante" is still used in some French-speaking places, although not that widely.

And I'll probably sound rather quaint if I use it myself :)

[For the record, I'm Greek but I learned French very early on because my dad had cousins in the Greek diplomatic corps and he wanted me to get a job there and he thought French is the language of diplomacy. I was not interested in that, of course. But at least, thanks to my dad's silly ambitions, I grew up practically billingual.]

French speaking Canadian, I still say soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, and quatre-vingt-dix.

Wait, is it quatre-vingt or quatre-vingts? Is there a context that would distinguish the pronunciation of those two?

Quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-un, quatre-vingt-deux... quatre-vingt mille, quatre-vingts millions. This doesn't affect pronounciation in general, because this s is silent... except in the context of liaisons, such that you would say "quatre-vingts (z')avions" and not "quatre-vingt (t')avions", although in colloquial speech, nobody cares. In written form, I expect many of my fellow French native speakers to do the mistake or at least be uncertain. We mostly write it "80" anyway.

Spelling depends on various things. If it's followed by another number, then its singular: quatre-vingt-trois. Otherwise, it's plural, quatre-vingts. Unless it's an ordinal / noun, J'habite au quatre-vingt rue de la Paix.

Pronunciation is the same, unless there is a liaison: elle a quatre-vingts ans = there will be a 'z' sound between vingts and ans.

FYI, I'm a native speaker and I had to look the spelling part up to be sure. There are other rules with other exceptions for cent, mille, million, milliard.

Interestingly “Four score and seven years ago” is "4 20 7" meaning 87.

Yep, that'd be the 87 years from 1776 (Declaration of Independence) to 1863 when the speech was given.

You stopped short of the worst of them! e.g. 97 is assembled from 4 parts. Quatre-vingt-dix-sept (4 20 10 7).

Only 70 and 90. 80 is still 4-20. In French-speaking Belgium, anyways.

Does 80 in France have any of the 420 weed connotations?

Of course not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com