• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Wait, spanish doesn’t do the “we don’t have a word for that number, just do math instead” counting system?? I thought the romance languages were tight!

    • jorge@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Well, there isn’t a word for 99 in Spanish or English, in both languages we say 90+9, so that counts as maths.

      If your asking about words for 70, 80 and 90, that is a peculiarity of French, and not even all dialects, some dialects have septante, huitante/octante and nonante for those.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      haha no

      It’s just the French being weird, there’s even some non-France French dialects that count normally.

      The Spanish might talk too fast to understand anyway, though.

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      1 year ago

      French is the only Romance language that does the count-by-twenties thing, as far as I know, but apparently some of the Celtic languages do it too. So French may have picked it up from Breton (or Gaulish or who-knows).