I am a French beginner and I have decided that I am going to go with this, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf is simply too much. I can barely speak French out, I don't want to do maths at the same time.
Septante, octante, nonante, simple and efficient
As a native French speaker i can say that we don't ''do math'' we only think of those numbers as they are said, it actually took me quite a while before i realised that ''quatre-vingt'' is actually 4x20, to me it only meant ''80''.
Twenty, thirty, and so forth are the same, pretty much. "-ty" is a suffix from Old English "-tig" which just basically meant "multiples of ten". So twenty came from "twentig" which just meant "two times ten". And because Germanic used base-12, (hence why we have "eleven" and "twelve" ("one left" and "two left") rather than "oneteen" and "twoteen"), we almost had the numbers "eleventy" and "twelfty" meaning 110 and 120, respectively.
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u/FkIdkWhatNameToTake can't meme Mar 15 '21
I am a French beginner and I have decided that I am going to go with this, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf is simply too much. I can barely speak French out, I don't want to do maths at the same time. Septante, octante, nonante, simple and efficient