I don’t speak French, but the higher numbers resemble the old “Four score and twenty years ago…” Eighty is four score. Ninety is four score and ten. It does seem unwieldy.
There’s nothing unusual about this. Just try learning to count to 100 in Bengali. There’s not much of a pattern. You basically have to memorise all 100 numbers.
In Wallonia (the French-speaking southern half of Belgium), things are more logical: ‘septante’, ‘octante’ and ‘nonante’ instead of ‘soixante-dix’, ‘quatre-vingts’ and 'quatre-vingt-dix.
Well it depends, on where you live, I curently live near the Quebec/Ontario borderline and in french we use the numbers as you said (the whole quebec uses it that way), however we do get a TV channel that broadcasts stuff from France and Belgium, and I noticed they were using the following terms for 80 and 90:
80 “octante”
90 “neunante”
but I guess the “quatre-vingt, etc etc” are also good, I have no idea of their origin…
Also when counting from 15 to 20 it also gets different"
OK, why? Because of 10 fingers and 10 toes – like a Base 20 (if there is such a thing)? I’m way out of my league discussing math of even the simplest sort, but my understanding was that humans count to 10 and then start over with variations, because having 10 fingers made this the most expedient thing to do. Now it’s starting to sound like Base 10 is only the inclination of one or a few languages or cultures. Hm?
Perhaps the mistake is in assuming that all number names were created all at once with an orderly pattern in mind. I would imagine that any particularlanguage might have developed several words for a certain number and that factors other than intentional organisation influenced which number names were adopted.
Now, making groups of fours and fives is actually a very intuitive exercise to humans. Four or five objects are about the most a person can “count” in their head by mere sight – a pile of 7 or 8 shells are not so easy to discern from each other with a quick, instinctive glance.
The origins of the Celtic base-20 counting system may be similar to that of the Yoruba system.
A friend of mine worked a switchboard once and though he’s bilingual, he complained about the French numbering. He had to type phone numbers into his board and sometimes the caller would say “quatre-” (and he would type a 4) “-vingt-” (and he would curse to himself, hit backspace and change it to an 8) “-seize” (and he would curse again, backspace again and change it to a 9).
I’m currently reading a very interesting book called The Nothing That Is: A Natural History Of Zero by Robert Kaplan. One of the first uses of zero was as a placeholder in a string of written digits, such as 409. Prior to this development, people thought of numbers as sort of different sized lumps of objects, rather than as abstract numbers as we do today. For example, 409 means four hundreds plus zero tens plus nine ones. To the Romans, the same number would be CDIX, or five hundred minus one hundred plus ten minus one. I don’t know if the Romans would have said it that way out loud, but the point is that the words for numbers date from a time when people didn’t think in abstract mathematical numbers, but in terms of how many pieces of gold, or sheep, or whatever, they did or didn’t have.
Lots of numbering systems are odd. In Denmark (and probably Sweden and Norway too), not only do you say (the equivalent of) 4 and 20 (as in German), but things start to get weird at 50. To say 54 you say 4 and half third. And 64 is 4 and third. and 74 is 4 and half fourth. What these apparently mean is 4 and halfway to the third twenty and so on.
And in French Switzerland, they say septante, huitante (not the Belgium octante), and nonante. And parts of France use these or variants. Also six vingt and qunize vingt are occasionally used for 120 and 300, resp.
Why twenty and not twoty? And why thirteen and not threeteen? Not to mention fifteen.
