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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

As a French, I always found that the way Wallons or Swiss word out numbers >69 makes way more sense than ours

Growing in Belgium, we learned that our Walloon brethren use septante (70), quatre-vingts (4 * 20 or 80) and nonante (90).

We never learned huitante (80), but here are apparently parts of Belgium that use is. We did learn soixante-dix and quatre-vingts-dix, and were allowed to use both. [0]

The Swiss also use huitante, and Nova Scotia uses octante.

[0]: Funnily enough, writing American English was a no-go. We had to write centre, colour, metre, lift (elevator), ticket (receipt).

Ha, I only knew of octante, I dd not know there was a "huitante". I worked at CERN and it was octante.

I often wondered if the fact your number system forces you to multiply somehow affects your mathematical competence. France has won a lot of Fields medals.

No, because nobody thinks 4*20+16 when saying 96, this is just a string in your head, without any links to 4, 20, 16. This is just a word like "ghdtehbdf"

The English number system kind of also forces you to multiply. Ninety-six is nine tens plus six, or 9*10+6. French is just special because they randomly sneak in base 20. But I doubt they really think more about saying 4 score plus sixteen then you do about saying nine tens plus six.

What is more influential (in a detrimental way) is German randomly switching reading direction. They read 2196 as 2000+100+6+90 instead of the more reasonable 2000+100+90+6

Dutch does that too, and I've tried out what happens if you say it correctly ("negentig 'n zes", ninety and six, instead of "zes 'n negentig")

It takes a second to process and then they'll ask "do you mean [reverse order variant]?" so they do kinda get it and I think transitioning to the sane version could be possible without much trouble, but people would have to want to

It's because if it's out of order, your "partial interpretation so far" in your head gets messed up. A relative of mine pulls a version of this in English (that I find hilarious): in American English we usually read phone numbers one digit at a time, but sometimes group pairs of digits, and it doesn't really matter because "forty five" and "four five" present in the same order. Their phone number has a 1 in it, so to prank people that are writing down or typing the number they read it as (numbers made up, but the effect is):

   five
   six
   seven
   four
   -teen

...

and then cracks up. I cracked up when it was done to me, although apparently not everyone finds it so funny. ;)

In France we read our numbers in pairs: 01 23 45 67 89. The initial zero is complicated, it is a butchered-up solution when we were transitioning the numbers and in an international context one never knows whether to say +33 0 1 23 45... or +33 1 23 45... (the latter one is correct, though both will likely work). When you remove the zero in the international version, lots of systems will format the number by triplets, which seems to be more common in Europe (+33 123 456 789)

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie…

I had schoolteachers who still spoke like this in 1970s Yorkshire. I don’t know if it was a regional dialect thing or a generational thing across all England, but among the over-40s back then it was still pretty common to hear German-style backwards numbers in English.

I once read an article claiming ghat Chinese are do good at math for two reasons:

1. Their words for Numbers are based on Base-10 system (so no nonsense such as „eleven” and „twelve”)

2. Their words for Numbers are short, one syllabe, so they can keep morę of them in their short term memory at once

Not saying there’s any truth to that, but sounds interesting

We can test your theory by checking how the Danes fared.

https://blogs.transparent.com/language-news/2016/08/29/danis...

As a no French, I love French numbers you dislike. 90 being 4 20 10 is something sort of awesome and funny.

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