• Corndog@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    As much as I love shitting on the French for being terrible with numbers (seriously, how the fuck is the word for ‘99’ ‘four-twenties, a ten, and a nine’?!?) this one seems intentional so you can feel when you run out.

    • BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      The funny thing is that in Switzerland they commonly say nonante neuf. So it’s not like there is no word for 90

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Because way back when, before sensible systems, they used base-20, and despite now running base-10, the base-20 is stuck in the language.

      Edit it’s sort of in most languages actually, not just to that extent. I mean, English has “twenty-one”, but no “onety-one”. 1-20 have their own numbers in most languages I think, and after twenty you just repeat the first 10 and add whatever tens you like, whereas the French sometimes repeat the first 20 and add an amount of twenties

      • Asetru@feddit.org
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        5 months ago

        English has “twenty-one”, but no “onety-one”.

        But you have teens? Thirteen, fourteen etc? It’s just that a dozen was kind of special, so eleven and twelve are kind of irregular, but afterwards it’s just ordinary base 10, isn’t it?

        • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
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          5 months ago

          But the endian switches for the teens — twenty three is “tens place ones place,” but thirteen is “ones place tens place.”

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Well, English does. Not my native language.

          Yes, my point exactly. No “onety-one”, because “eleven”.

          Same with other languages.

          But “thirteen”, “fourteen” etc, you think are as regular as “twenty one”, “thirty three” “forty five”?

          It is base-10 all the way through, but I’m just pointing out that probably at one point in history, even other languages, for some reason, counted 1-20 differently than 20+ numbers and they sort of stuck.

      • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        We’re not bad with numbers, just at naming them. 😉 But that’s why we pretty much always use abbreviations.

        Abbreviations. Of numbers. Don’t think about it. 😅

    • Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Wait til you find out how Abraham Lincoln counted the passage of time in the Gettysburg Address…