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A comment on How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World. Parent comment

Re:How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World by thaumasiotes on Friday January 03, 2014 @12:43AM (#7004348)
How does French qualify as using a base-20 counting system? Intuitively, I'd expect that to mean

- special words for the numbers 1-19

- special words for 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, ..., 380

- special words for 400, 8000, 160,000, etc.

Instead, what we actually see in French is

- special words for the numbers 1-16

- special words for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 80

- special words for 100, 1000, 1,000,000, etc.

This is a base-10 system (with the odd quirk), as far as I can see.

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Re:How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World by jgg on Friday January 03, 2014 @11:03AM (#7006070)
It is actually referred to as a "base 20" counting system, although I agree that it isn't a very good one. It's definitely not a "pure" base-20 system, but many numbers are expressed of a multiple of twenty + remainder.

Perhaps a better example of a feature in a language that would provide more prominent cognitive differences would be one of the languages that requires users to mark a statement based on how they know the fact (witness, second-hand account, etc.), whose names escape me. Ah well.

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