dave@murphy.UUCP (12/13/86)
I realize that this has nothing to do with anything, but since the subject was brought up, I'll go ahead and say it anyway. In article <228@watcgl.UUCP>, awpaeth@watcgl.UUCP writes (in response to an eariler article): > Surviving forms exist in nursury rhymes: "four and twenty blackbirds" >or in the "teens". ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^ I was told in my college French class that the "teens" is a remnant of an old Anglo-Saxon counting system which was a radix-20 system. (Actually, it wasn't a place-value system like the Arabic system, but they did tend to state things in form of a quotient-and-remainder of twenty.) More of it survives in French; they don't have words for seventy and ninety, so to say seventy-three in French you say "soixante-treize", which translates literally as "sixty-thirteen". (Well, they actually do have words for seventy and ninety, but they have come into use fairly recently and still aren't accepted as being "proper" French.) Imagine what math would be like if we were still counting in radix 20! --- "I used to be able to sing the blues, but now I have too much money." -- Bruce Dickinson Dave Cornutt, Gould Computer Systems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL UUCP: ...!{sun,pur-ee,brl-bmd,bcopen}!gould!dcornutt or ...!{ucf-cs,allegra,codas}!novavax!houligan!dcornutt ARPA: dcornutt@gswd-vms.arpa (I'm not sure how well this works) "The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my employer, not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary."