Let us dredge up our memories of high school/college French. Say we’re counting pennies. Everything goes swimmingly through the first sixty-nine cents: it’s the standard “tens plus ones” that you see in Latin. Then we get to seventy, and, inexplicably, we’re now counting “sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve.” And then we get to eighty and, hell, we’re counting in base twenty: “four twenties, four twenties and one…” all the way up through “four twenties and nineteen.”
And at that point we go back to normal, but Latin is sort of sighing and staring at us over the dinner table, wondering if French is really its child.
Seriously: you don’t randomly start counting in base-twenty in Latin, or in any other Romance language. When did French lose its damn mind, and why only between seventy and ninety-nine?
And English had something of the same too - “The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years : yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow;” as the Psalmist is translated in the Book of Common Prayer.
Irish has a vigesimal system too (or at least the vestiges of one - it’s vestigially vigesimal). The word for 40 means “2 twenties”; old people’s ages are stated as “4 score and three”, or whatever. This is quite common in Celtic languages, so the idea that it came from Gaulish into French seems plausible.
The question isn’t so much when did the French start doing non-decimal things, it’s when did everyone else stop.
English has score, the Scandinavian languages have snes for the same number, although it’s only Danish, to the confusion of its Scandinavian neighbours, that has based its words for 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 on it, “everyone” uses dozen and used to use gross. Norse, although purely decimal up to that point, went “nine tens”, “ten tens”, “eleven tens”, “hundred”, and some industries used “big hundred” for 120 into the 19th and even 20th century.
I’m glad you pinned this on the English translators, because that’s not how it is in the original. Hebrew is fully decimal. In fact, it is even more fully decimal than Modern English, which has standalone words for “eleven” and “twelve”, while Hebrew calls them (the equivalent of) "one&ten"and “two&ten” in the same pattern as 13-19.
No, it’s not, because Latin does not count in base 20. Since French descends from Latin, clearly there was a point at which French did not do this, and then a later point at which it did.
The Celtic hypothesis seems the most straightforward explanation.
IIRC (didn’t reread the thread yet), according to posts in this thread, the Celtic origin isn’t really certain. It also includes many examples of similar ways of counting in other European languages.
French descends (mostly) from Latin, but the people who spoke early French descended (mostly) from the Celts. Likely the proto-French people never switched from counting by twenties – they just switched the language in which they were doing it.
I’m reminded of some of the foreign students I went to school with who spoke very good English, but would mutter to themselves in their mother tongue while doing mental arithmetic. Even with a near complete mastery of another language for speaking, it’s hard to learn a new way to count.
After reading this thread again, it seems I was the poster who mentioned that, according to some sites, the Celtic origin was dubious. I honestly didn’t remember that.
It’s worth pointing out here that Swiss French uses septante, huitante, and nonante instead of soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, and quatre-vingts-dix, and that Belgian French uses septante and nonante too (cite.) However, I don’t have any idea when these dialects diverged from “French” French.
Fascinating stuff, and the Gaulish connection is interesting - I had no idea other languages counted that way.
So Belgians go from septante-neuf to quatre-vingts and then quatre-vingt-neuf to nonente. If I ever wanted proof that languages are anything but exact sciences…
Never mind that…how about the method of counting sheep in my neck of the woods. Very much still in use. (Teesdale if you are interested…you aren’t of course)
Several other languages are vigesimal, incl. Ainu, Mayan, Basque. A language ancestral to Basque was present in France before Celtic and is likely the source of Celtic vigesimal.
As leachim pointed out, there’s no “clearly” about it, although I think it’s equally wrong to write that the reverse hypothesis is “likely” without some evidence. My point though wasn’t that the French way of counting isn’t an import with a historically discoverable transition time, it’s that the question is biased by the increasing dominance of decimal thinking in our time.
Although Latin numerals are base 10, the Romans are the ones who spread the duodecimal weights and measuring units throughout Europe and you don’t have to go that many decades back before people were comfortable thinking in twelves and twenties or tens depending on context.
Ah, my one useful potential contribution to this thread, cruelly snatched away. As one who is currently struggling to learn French to be able to converse with his SO’s Swiss family, the Swiss counting system is far more sensible. The French can mock it all they want - “four-twenties-and-three” is just silly, specially from the nation in which the basis of the decimal-based SI unit system was signed.
Then again, counting in Hindi goes “twenty-seven, twenty-eight, one-less-than-thirty, thirty, thirty-one”, so I shouldn’t really mock this.
I’ve never learned to count in Basque beyond ten and went to check - the root of 40 is 2x20, for 60 3x20, for 4 4x20, so it’s doing the same thing that French does with 60 and 80, but also with 40 (100 gets a non-scored name).