The number that fights back

French numbers deliver a small, sharp lesson: a language’s official form can be an absurdity that simply outlasted the alternatives. Up to sixty, everything behaves, vingt, and the tens march normally. Then, Juan reports, “desde el 70 para adelante se putea todo” ▸ 2:14. Seventy is soixante-dix, sixty-and-ten. Eighty is quatre-vingts, four-twenties. Ninety is quatre-vingt-dix, four-twenties-and-ten, and ninety-one is quatre-vingt-onze, four-twenties-and-eleven ▸ 3:42. It’s a base-20 fossil that makes a beginner do arithmetic just to count, and he’d rather memorize five clean words than run those sums ▸ 2:32.

lo oficial no es lo óptimo; es lo que quedó →

The twist that turns a complaint into a teaching is that the mess was already fixed, just not in France. Swiss, Belgian, and Canadian French use septante, huitante, nonante, plain and regular ▸ 1:14, so the same language runs a sane number system a border away. It’s the smallest possible proof of a thesis Severo keeps bumping into, that a curriculum’s official standard is a convention, not a law of nature: the version that got canonized isn’t the optimal one, it’s the one that stuck, and the regional variants are often the reasonable ones. When a language makes you multiply by twenty to say ninety, the right lesson isn’t to admire the tradition. It’s to notice who quietly refused it…