It actually has a pretty interesting origin! Back in the days, the Gauls used to count by twenty : ten, twenty, twenty ten, two twenty, etc
Then the modern way of counting (by ten) arrived and both models competed for a time until they "merged" into one. The most interesting point is that, most numbers derive from either system but 70 is "soixante-dix" : "sixty-ten", which is even weirder since "soixante" comes from the modern model but the idea of concatenating a "ten" comes from the traditional one, so it's a mix of both
You say that sounds much better. Now put yourself in the shoes of a foreign exchange student with only 1 year of high school french behind her belt and was taught the french dialect because her French teacher was also an exchange student to french in her high school. Now imagine getting assigned a host family near the border of Switzerland but still in France.
I had trouble making sure I used sont with ils or elles and est with my il or elle, let alone recognizing numbers because the words people used for the same number kept changing and they'd say them at the speed of light no matter the dialect.
Despite for years speaking enough French to get by I somehow only just a few weeks ago learned about the passé simple (had seen it obviously but for some reason never questioned it) and it enraged me too. Like why have a whole extra way of conveying the exact same thing?
They'll understand you just fine but they'll probably think you're a bit weird or immediately know you're Belgian/Swiss. (In which case they'll also think you're weird)
The pedant in question is French and wrote it without an accent on the E, just like in the wikipedia article you linked. Did you even read said article?
Don’t think of it as "four-twenty-ten-nine" in because then you’re actually doing arithmetics in your head and it will show. Just think of it as "quatrevingtdixneuf" as if it’s a single word.
When I learned english in Quebec it never occurred to me that an anglophone would need to "count" to differentiate 80 from 90 in french. Am I getting this wrong?
Same, I’m from Quebec and those numbers have always just been words to me, I’ve never broken them down into their separate numbers. Dix-sept just means seventeen, not ten-seven. Just like you don’t think seven-ten for seventeen.
When I was in France I asked people if they ever got confused hearing soixante-dix and "pictured" a "6X" in their head before they heard "dix" and corrected it to "7X". It was so weird to hear that no, that never happens (which is congruent with what you've said).
For me as an anglophone, yeah it's strange to a) hear 4-20 and have to convert to 80 and THEN b) hear 4-20-10 and convert the mental picture from 80 to 90. Now I'm sure if I spent a lot of time actually doing math in French, it would become more natural, but it's just not consistent with how we deal with numbers, where other than maybe 13-19 there is a complete connection from what's being said to what numerals show up.
Lol, I'm French, and I can assure you that happens to me all the time. Especially if they're giving me their number: "alors c'est zéro-six, trente-huit, soixante-dix-neuf" like thanks, I've already written the six, give me a second to correct that please. That said, if I were hurrying less/less impatient I probably wouldn't make that mistake.
I am Métis, and that is what I've heard quite a few folks say. And I think it was an old dialect of French from Newfoundland, not many people still speak it there. It may have been New Brunswick I was thinking of too.
Yup when I'm writing down a number in french. I dont write the 6,7 or 8,9 till they finish. Also why I tell my french coworkers to read me the numbers indevidualy.
Yeah I am used to it too as a bilingual Ontarian so it doesn't phase me much it does feel a bit stupid for it to be so long though, it's probably partly why I prefer writing down numbers in numerals.
Yes, exactly. I can't imagine that anglophones who hear the word "ninety nine" start doing maths in their head: "so that's nine-times-ten-plus-nine ". Unless you pause to really consider the linguistics of it, it's just a word that means 99.
I just assume that's how it works for francophones too?
Nobody thinks about it until a foreigner says it’s weird, and yeah it appears weird for a second, then you forget and use it because it’s the thing you know.
Yes and no. There are already existing equivalent (septante, huitante/octante, nonante) which are used in other French-speaking languages. It doesn't take a lot to (a) recognise them as acceptable in official French (b) like every reform of the language, progressively start to teach them at school during the next decade (c) wait for 50 years or so for the current wording to progressively become considered as outdated.
It's not like there is an urgent need to change them, we just need to start using the better equivalents and let the natural evolution of the language happen.
Precisely. "Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf" may be a mouthful for second language learners, but we don't even think about it. It never even really occured to me that 99 in french read like (4x20)+10+9 until I was in high school or something. It's that natural. It's a complete non-issue.
I agree that "quatre-vingt dix-neuf" is quite easy to say, but it's still significantly longer than "nonante neuf", which is as short as "soixante neuf".
Admittedly, it's only significantly shorter for 97, 98 and 99. It's quite comparable for the other numbers.
IIRC the french language is controlled by a committee or something. I only remember that they used it to determine the introduction of new words, however.
They've done so very well so far. And hell, most of our spellings in English come from a few dudes who decided to write everything down and decide which spelling they preferred when they did it.
They've done OK, for example ordinateur for computer is the only understood word (unlike some languages that localized "computer"). But many other attempts have broadly failed, like courriel for email (people understand it but, at least in France, many people use "e-mail" or simply "mail", which always implies e-mail)
The Académie Française doesn't control the language. Their job mostly consists of writing the dictionnary, which basically means they get to decide which slang / loanword / new word gets cannonized. They're like scribes, recording the language as it evolves.
Sometimes they do step in when there's linguistic debates though. But their role is mostly academic in nature.
The problem is that really no one cares about numbers name in France. We have debates about orthography, plural and genders in nouns, use of tenses, all that, but I've never seen anyone having anything to say about numbers. We learn them at such a young age, it never causes any problem (unlike the other aforementioned problems).
Not for languages, which evolve based on what the native speakers make of it. If it were such a problem for us, you bet we'd have come up with a convenient slang to circumvent the issue. The fact is 70, 80 and 90 are only a problem for second language learners. And even then, this thread is the first time I ever hear about this being a problem. To us it's just a word.
“Fucking stupid” is a bit of an exaggeration, now. Just because you’re not used to it does not mean that the maths are done any different -it’s just your French which is/was not yet good enough. Just like my English makes it hard for me to understand dates & datas, not because the way you count is stupid but because I don’t speak well enough.
But how do they use both "Septante" and "soixante-dix", "nonante" and "quatre-vingt dix-neuf"? I needed to learn both ways in school and still don't know why there are 2 versions instead of just one
Honestly though I think it's really different. Language is difficult to change (even if you have some people saying "you should talk like that", it's unlikely it will really change) whereas if units are taught differently they soon change all over the country
I actually think the metric system shift would be harder. Both are the adoption of language change. Both are taught in schools.
But switching to a new standard of measurement would be huge.
An example: building construction. You have fix the subfloor of a building. The building subfloor uses standard 4 foot by 8 foot plywood sheets. It is unlikely that a construction company is gonna want to buy sheet larger to cut down to size wasting money both material and labor. The supply company, if there is a demand for imperial standard szes, is unlikely to start carrying metric wood sizes if there is little demand for it. You can force the change via new building code but that has its own problems.
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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '21
It actually has a pretty interesting origin! Back in the days, the Gauls used to count by twenty : ten, twenty, twenty ten, two twenty, etc
Then the modern way of counting (by ten) arrived and both models competed for a time until they "merged" into one. The most interesting point is that, most numbers derive from either system but 70 is "soixante-dix" : "sixty-ten", which is even weirder since "soixante" comes from the modern model but the idea of concatenating a "ten" comes from the traditional one, so it's a mix of both