SY said:
Well, I will highjack my own thread, but a bit of history. Taking into account my english, don't blame on me if something isn't clear
There are seveal hypothesis but the most agreed one is that, the futur "France" country, more than one thousand years before J.C was poulated by Celtics peoples.
This population used to count on a 20 digits basis. Why ? Because if you sum the numbers of fingers of your hands and feets, it's 20 !
Then came the latin people and it was a "language revolution" for Gaulle people (Asterix & Obelix
) , and the numbers became expressed on a 10 digits basis. At this time, septante, octante and nonante started to appear in our language.In the 4, 5th century, the celts kings came back to create France and started to look into the very old books, written by celts people and they decided to push back the 20 digits basis in the french language.
Untill the XVII, a lot of french writters kept using this 20 digits basis. Therefore 80 is "Four Twenty, quatre vingt in french", 90 is "Four twenty and ten - quatre vingt dix in French"
After this date, it's very difficult to find out an explanation on why only 70, 80, 90 remains in the 20 digit basis in our language, whereas all other numbers are based on the latinan way of counting... Several hypothesis exists, but nothing really relevant. The most common one is that after the French Revolution, people wanted to get ride off with all the historical links to the Celts kings, but this is an assumption, nothing has been yet confirmed .
Last funny thing : in the trading floors (I used to be a trader one decade ago), words "septante, octante, nonante for 70,80,90" are often used on the phone in order to avoid any confusion with 60 or decimal numbers like 4.20 (quatre vingt in "financial" french).
All in all, we are not so stupids but proud of our history
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.