It seems that unfortunately it's just one of those things we are going to have to put up with in life. So maybe it isn’t such a crazy system after all.Īfter all, as another reader of The Local points out, the system is “great for children learning multiplication”. To translate, ‘Four score and seven’, means four-twenty and seven, in other words, 4 x 20 + 7 (87) – on exactly the same principle as the French! “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty…” Think back to Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address and you may remember how without realising, we know ‘score’ to mean twenty: Gilles Montrichard, from ABA English Academy said there was “no need to change something that causes no problems for French people”.Īnd criticise as we might, the idea of counting in twenties actually used to be part of the English language too. No doubt French learners would love it if the language guardians at the Academie Francaise decided to ditch the fingers and toes system and adopt the Swiss French number system, but we have to remember that most French people don't have an issue with their numbers. There was a short period during the Middle Ages when the roman versions ‘ septante’, ‘ huitante’ and ‘ nonante’ looked like they were going to stick but then tradition partially prevailed for the French and they managed to reclaim their ancient ways of saying eighty ( quatre-vingt) to ninety-nine ( quatre-vingt-dix-neuf). Well the story goes that when the Roman invaders came to France, they tried to impose their language and methods on the French but they weren’t entirely successful. READ ALSO: Ten ways France should make learning French easier Perfectly logical when you put it like that.īut why then, didn’t they just stick to one? The hospital was so named because it housed 300 beds and 300 is 15 times 20. One good example of this is the Paris hospital called l’Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts (The Hospital of fifteen-twenty). While others say it was the Viking influence and point to the fact that Danish numbers also works on the base 20 “vigesimal system”. Many believe it ended up in French due to the influence of the Celts in France, whose languages use the base 20 system. Fingers and toes included, you get twenty.
This is supposedly as they used their feet as well as their hands to count. Then in comes the “ vigesimal system” which used the base 20, hence quatre-vingt-quatre (84). In French too, we see this, up until the seventies when, as we've said, things go weird. This means that everything is based on multiples of ten. There is the method that us Anglophones know, which comes from the Romans and is called base ten. Historically, there is more than one method for counting. In some parts of Belgium, some of these are used too. Switzerland uses ‘septante' for 70, ‘octante’ or ‘huitante’ for 80 and ‘nonante’ for 90. Our troubles are made all the more frustrating given that in other French-speaking countries, the system follows a more logical pattern (logical to us, anyway). The fact the joke below has been shared thousands of times on Facebook suggests there is an issue here. One reader said the system was “specially designed to puzzle foreigners”.Īnother reader admits that “ Still after five years I have to stop and think about it”. “When the French say numbers to me my ears just shut down! It is denial I know,” said one reader. The Local's readers regularly show their frustration with French numbers. Phone numbers in France are said in pairs, so someone might tell you their number is zero six, trente-et-un, quatre-vingt-dix etc. If you live in Val d'Oise (95) you will need to say quatre-vingt quinze for your département number, rather than cheating and saying neuf cinq (the exeption to this rule is le neuf trois). So a Peugeot 206 is 'two oh six' in English but deux cent six in French. To make things more difficult, large numbers in French are generally spoken as a whole rather than broken down into digits. Ninety-nine translates to 'four-twenty-ten-nine' or quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.Ĭan you imagine the life of salesman trying to flog discount TVs for €99.99? With French, it isn’t just about being good at the language, in order to get to grips with these higher numbers it seems you need to be good at mental maths too… Take 77 for example, or rather, ‘sixty-ten-seven’ as it would be said in French.
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