{"id":2522,"date":"2014-09-22T09:10:59","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T13:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=2522"},"modified":"2020-10-02T13:14:50","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T17:14:50","slug":"silly-french-numbers-four-twenties-and-ten-or-ninety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2014\/09\/22\/silly-french-numbers-four-twenties-and-ten-or-ninety\/","title":{"rendered":"Silly French Numbers: “Four Twenties and Ten” or “Ninety”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Itchy<\/a><\/p>\n

Last summer I spent a little over a month in the DRC, or Democratic Republic of Congo, for work. As the DRC is a Francophone country, and my trilingual colleague did not feature French on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of tongues, it was up to me to break out my rusty fran\u00e7ais<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It did not go as well as it could have.<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t spoken a word of the language of love<\/a> since I left Morocco almost two years prior, and even then it was teetering between \u201cconversational\u201d and \u201cinsulting.\u201d I never studied French a day in my life, and in fact French was never on my to-do list<\/a> until I moved to Lyon for . . . well, for love. Go figure.<\/p>\n

So I wasn\u2019t the best-prepared French speaker in the Congo. We had a driver (it wasn\u2019t a fancy thing\u2014if you don\u2019t want to get stopped by military police looking for bribes, you need a driver and a mean-looking Jeep) and I recall joking to him that my French wasn\u2019t very good. \u201cIt\u2019s true,\u201d he said seriously. \u201cYour French is not very good.\u201d<\/p>\n

I also had a hard time with the local accent. In Western DRC, the local language is Lingala, which is an extremely simplified vernacular with about 7 words (give or take). As such, they fill in the considerable blanks with French, or French-ish Congolese slang, and these odd figures of speech and idiosyncratic jargon bled into their regular French. Even on a good day, it\u2019s tough to understand a native French speaker going all-out, but add to that a layer of linguistic color Congolese-style, and you might find yourself quite lost.<\/p>\n

That said, there were certain quite wonderful aspects. The first, of course, is that since for the locals French is an adopted language, nobody really cared<\/a> if you butchered it. They did it too (probably on purpose, to spite the former colonies). The second were the fun little phrases you did pick up\u2014for instance, a common greeting in French is the simple \u00e7a va<\/em>? This just means, \u201cgoing well?\u201d The usual response is \u00e7a va<\/em> again (\u201cyep, going well\u201d) or, if you\u2019re really off your game, \u00e7a va mal<\/em> (\u201cgoing badly\u201d). In the Congo, they would rarely admit to things going badly. Rather, they said \u00e7a va en peu <\/em>(\u201cgoing well, a little bit\u201d). It\u2019s such a subtle understatement, it\u2019s almost too <\/em>French.<\/p>\n

But the final specific thing I loved about Congolese French was that they didn\u2019t use the utterly absurd French counting system, as demonstrated in the above comic (essentially, for 70, 80, 90 they literally say \u201csixty-ten,\u201d \u201cfour-twenties,\u201d and \u201cfour-twenties-ten.\u201d This can get confusing very fast if you\u2019re not used to it). For you see, the DRC used to be the Belgian Congo, so they\u2019re actually speaking Belgian French. And in Belgium, like in Switzerland, they use the perfectly reasonable and civilized system of saying \u201cseventy, eighty, ninety,\u201d for which I love them.<\/p>\n

Funnily enough, I looked into it, and it turns out that nobody really knows why the French still use this bizarre way of counting. We do know that in the Middle Ages, it was even worse\u2014they had vingt et\u00a0dis\u00a0<\/em>(\u201ctwenty-and-ten,\u201d for 30),\u00a0deux vingts\u00a0<\/em>(\u201ctwo twenties,\u201d for 40),\u00a0trois vingts<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cthree twenties,\u201d for 60) and even quinze-vingts<\/em> (\u201cfifteen twenties,\u201d for 300). Maybe they wanted to teach everyone basic arithmetic and this was the only thing they could think of.<\/p>\n

But have no fear! Those days, gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 Dieu<\/em>, are dead and gone.<\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re studying French or living in France, and your daily life is made a little bit more miserable thanks to their silly way of counting, just know that it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. You can always move to Belgium, or Switzerland, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s \u00e7a va beaucoup<\/em> (\u201cgoing well, a lot\u201d) if you ask me.<\/p>\n

What about you? Are you learning a language and struggling with something that isn\u2019t at all difficult in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

Last summer I spent a little over a month in the DRC, or Democratic Republic of Congo, for work. As the DRC is a Francophone country, and my trilingual colleague did not feature French on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of tongues, it was up to me to break out my rusty fran\u00e7ais. It did not go as…<\/p>\n

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