Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 09:40:20 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>, "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c) Message-ID: <p05111723b910fac1be02@[10.0.1.4]> In-Reply-To: <20020522064417.GA893@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020519100324.GK44562@daemon.ninth-circle.org> <20020519134348.I67779@blossom.cjclark.org> <p05111722b90de01cc974@[10.9.8.215]> <20020520195703.A79046@dragon.nuxi.com> <p05111701b90fb2744154@[10.9.8.215]> <20020521103710.C71209@lpt.ens.fr> <p05111703b90fc048bd8f@[10.0.1.4]> <20020521133026.L71209@lpt.ens.fr> <p05111705b90fe1afee46@[10.0.1.4]> <20020522112854.A26107@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020522064417.GA893@lpt.ens.fr>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 8:44 AM +0200 2002/05/22, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> On the other hand, in Antwerp practically nobody speaks French. Seems
> funny to me that a nation so tiny can be so sharply divided in
> language...
True enough.
> The Belgians have at least one major improvement in the French
> language to their credit: they have sensible words for numbers above
> 69. In France, 70 is sixty-ten (soixante-dix), 71 is sixty-eleven, 80
> is four-twenties, 90 is four-twenties-ten, 99 is
> four-twenties-ten-nine.
Whereas in Belgium, we have septante, quatre-vingts, and nonante.
They fixed seventy and ninety, but for whatever bizarre reason,
they left eighty alone.
> Surely this situation is something the
> Academie Française should have been concerned about long ago, but no
> -- the French find the Belgian number system (70=septante, etc)
> hilarious.
Any time that some French-speaking person starts ragging on the
English language, I usually just ask them what the word for "ninety"
is in French, and it helps if we had recently been talking about
differences between Belgian/Wallonian French versus French/French.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p05111723b910fac1be02>