Yau

[Abstract of the Mainichi news]

21 people including the head of a French Language school in Tokyo have filed a damages lawsuit against Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara over his comment that "French fails as an international language." They demand an apology and 10 million yen compensation.

The Tokyo Governor made the controversial remark while speaking at a meeting in support of the establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan University in October last year.

"I have a feeling it is aptly said that French fails as an international language because it is a language that can't count numbers," he said.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/nation...na011000c.html

Yau

i believe most french learners should experience the difficulty of counting number in French. 70 = 60 + 10; 97 = 2x40 + 17. But then I ignored all the complexity and remember, let say, "quatre-vingt dix" as a single word, then everything became much easier for me.

I think most french learners can finally overcome the problem quite easily too and see how tokyo governor's comment is misleading, but I'm always curious how French see their number system. What's the origin of it? Does it imply that Ancient French adopted a base-7 number system (using digit from 0 to 7)?

The_FD

I agree with you that french people don't even think of the complexity of their number when counting. It is just a word. What is difficult is not to count but to spell the numbers correctly

By the way, 90 ("quatre-vingt-dix") is not 2x40 + 10 but 4x20 + 10 in fact... a bit more complex

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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...

Yau

ahh.! Sorry for my bad. I've just forgotten too successfully all these formula for counting number in french.

Yau

Thanks for the info. I didn't know there're the words "septante", "octante" and "nonante" before.

Anyway, as an adult learner, I feel better to remember less vocab, but for native french, septante is obviously more efficient than quatre-vingt dix in terms of sounds and number of alphabets.

So why did the number system in Parisian French finally replace the rest of it?

pluiepoco

Even though I don't speak French, I'd like to say that French had been an international language before English for centuries. It was an international language yesterday and is still so today. The number counting though is different from English and many other languages, but that does not affect its international position of languages. The Governor's Argument is obviously wrong, but French's declination as an international language does exist somewhere but not there.

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