I love France. I love living in France. I'm retired now so absolute precision in numbers is not of absolute importance, but the French method of counting....?
Mapmakers do it with triangles and lots of numbers. I trained and qualified as a Land Surveyor back in the pre-electronic days of hand-cranked mechanical calculators and even log-tables; batteries not required. As such, the principal tenet rammed home during training and practice was to ensure that you always had at least two ways of calculating something from your observed angles and distances and errors in 'long numbers' had to be avoided at all costs. Mistakes could be costly (especially when setting-out bridges, tunnels and the like).
This is why, even now, several years into 'retirement' with my brain running at a gentler pace, I find the French way of 'speaking num
bers' extraordinary and, at least to me and countless others attempting to make headway with the language, prone to misinterpretation.
Apparently, in French long numbers are grouped in twos and/or threes but not as we would say in English. Take for example the number 205379099. In English we would most likely say "two-oh-five (pause), three -seven-nine (pause), zero-nine-nine. This would be correct even if we didn't actually pause. In French? Possibly "vingt, cinquante-trois, soixante-dix-neuf, zero-quatre-vingt-dix-neuf". Or, "deux-cents-cinq, trois-cents-soixante-dix-neuf, zero, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.
Depending on pauses discerned or otherwise by the listener, the former coud be a number as long and as erroneous as "2
0503601908019" or something, almost correct, like "20537908019.
In either case, the bridge would fall down.
The picture is of one of my survey stations in Oman, 1963
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