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Comment by Adrig | Hacker News Reader

You probably heard about the quirks in the French numerical system. For example, 99 is translated "quatre-vingt-dix-neuf" which is literally "four twenty ten nine".

This is a legacy of the base 20 numerical system used by the Celtics thousands of years ago before the modern Romance language drove it out. The hybridization with our current base 10 system came with the Roman conquest of the Gaul.

Another example of the base 20 in use is the Quinze-Vingts National Ophthalmology Hospital in Paris, where Quinze-Vingts (fifteen twenties) refers to the original capacity of 15*20 = 300 beds available when built in the Middle Ages.

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Yep! And, at least until the 'standardization' of Irish by a bunch of non-native speakers, modern Irish still used a base-20 system. It's actually still in use by a lot of native speakers in the Gaeltacht areas, though it's dying out as it wasn't included in the standard because it was 'too hard' (and, the cynic side of me would say, too different from English). It's a shame, but it's so nice to use and I try to use it whenever I speak Irish as it's part of the distinctly non-English heritage that is being lost in the language as it basically becomes coded English thanks to poor L2 learners.

There's also all sorts of languages that have non-base 10 counting systems. Some use 3, some use 12 and some have even more exotic ones. One in Papua New Guinea even originally has a base-27 counting system!

The Danish language still has remains of this. 60 is 'tres', from three 20's. 80 is 'firs' from four 20's. The odd tens are even weirder, since they count upwards, so 50 is 'halftreds', which is half of the third 20; 70 is 'halffirs'; and 90 is 'halffems', four whole and a half of the fifth 20. But 100 is 'hundred', so 'fems' alone is never used. Also, for larger numbers, the digit order get weird: 123 is hundredogtreogtyve, one hundred and three and twenty.

Famous english language example: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/four_score_and_seven_years_...

Originally from literal score in wood made as a tally mark when 20 items were counted.

Plus, dozens (and gross).

And base 60 becoming standard for time and degrees of a circle.

Minute (unit of time) comes from "minute (smaller part)", and second from second minute (small part of the small part).

Thanks for this! As a French, I always wondered why this oddity.

That should also be introduced when teachers explain hexadecimal :-)

Me too!

Btw, in the spirit of the title of this thread, in English you would say "as a French person". In the past, "Frenchman" was used but it's understandably out of favour these days.

"French" can be used as an adjective but not a noun in this context. It's a very common error, I suppose since "français" can be used as an adjective or a noun en français :)

And don't forget french as a verb! -said every high school guy ever

Ha! Indeed!

In fact in informal Quebecois French, it's also used as a verb, with the same meaning as in English.

As in "J'ai Frenché ma blonde" --> "I Frenched my girlfriend"

That is wrong. The demonym for a person from France is "French". It only sounds wrong to an English ear because we're so used to calling them Frenchmen, but it's chauvinism on our part, not a linguistic mistake on theirs.

Surely they the French could figure out that "neuf-dix-neuf" could work as well. I'm learning some South East Asian languages and the simplicity is astounding. Who needs "dix" when "dua dua" works just as well? (Indonesia)

Some French speaking countries use a more logic term for higher numbers. In Belgium and Switzerland 99 would be nonante-neuf which is ninety-nine.

My uneducated guess is that at the time, it was easier to keep the base 20 to visualize a higher number. Just like we say "a few dozen eggs" to get an overall sense of the volume, it made more sense to keep it that way instead of a more arithmetic approach. Not sure why it never evolved, tho.

> a more logic term

Logical according to whom? Why is base 10 more logical than any of the other bases? I'd argue it's not, it's simply that it's what we're used to so we think it's more logical.

You're right, “coherent” would be more appropriate here

The logical term is one that conceives the best amount of information with the least amount of phonemes. 4 20 10 9 isn’t it.

I don't agree with that use of 'logical'. That would, if anything, be 'efficient'. But languages aren't efficient; in fact, there's actually some evidence to the opposite - that languages have built in redundancy to make it easier to pick back up a conversation if part of a sentence is missed. This has been proposed as part of the origin from noun classes.

But I was more going on to the fact that 'base 10' is somehow more logical than any other base as a chosen one for natural languages. I see no reason why that is so.

In Mandarin, you can count to 99 using combinations of just 10 short sounds (without any variation). Ordinal numbers are made using one sound that goes in front of the number.

The names of days are the equivalent of Day 1, Day 2 etc. (except Sunday which is Sunday/Skyday), and months are Month 1, Month 2 etc.

A lot of French people are very materialistic. They're obsessed with Monet.

I thank you. I'm here all week...

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