Originally Posted by juchu!

Actually, the form "quatre-vingt-dix" overcame "nonante" approximately in the 19th century. You know, septante, octante and nonante are still used in Belgium and Switzerland !
That sais, however, this strange fact deserves to be a little bit explained. At the beginning, almost the whole french-speaking people used "septante", "octante" and "nonante" as well as "trente","quarante", "cinquante" and "soixante", numbers whose root comes from the latin language (see the Spanish words for them for example). But a short time before the French Revolution, dialect forms from the Northern area of the Paris region spread into the then capital city Versailles, so that "soixante-dix" etc. were said to be popular and thus vulgar words.

Still, I feel quite offended by that Japanese official's declaration. I mean : English too has its own bizarrenesses. A thread about that topic was thus posted in recent months. I suggest you to find it back, and as far as I remumber, I found it rather mind-boggling!!

Have a nice evening/afternoon/morning...