Four Score

“No Franglais allowed!”

Mr. Fox (Monsieur Renard) was a stickler for this rule in my 9th grade French class. We weren’t allowed to use both English and French to communicate, seeing as how this wasn’t the proper way to learn a foreign language.

The pros of that approach were that you really got the grammar down, but the cons were that you had a much harder time picking up vocabulary, and if you were stuck in the middle of a sentence, you sort of just sat there, stumbling and fumbling, wasting time.

Language is a funny thing. Learning it by rote memorization and by way of formalized education certainly didn’t leave me fluent in French, but it did give me an appreciation for different ways a language might turn out.

Let me give you an easy example of this: "quatre-vingt-dix-huit," which translates to ninety-eight in English but literally means "four twenties and eighteen."

Four twenties and eighteen?!? Are you kidding me?

If I were to spell out what 98 in English looks like, it would be nine tens and eight. Why on earth would French end up with four twenties and eighteen?

And there it is: that feeling.

The feeling is one of frustrated confusion, at least at first. The frustration arises because something I discover about the world doesn’t make sense.

I have a couple of choices. First, I can throw my hands up in the air and point out how it doesn’t make sense to people, and move on with my life. That’s what I did when I was 13.

Alternatively, I can do what I generally do nowadays: look something up. Now, I’m pretty forgiving of pre-internet Andrew. Looking up something like this back then would have taken far too much time and bandwidth away from other activities, and today it takes a minuscule fraction of the time and energy to find something out.

Nowadays, if that feeling arises, I start to get excited. If something doesn’t make sense, there’s a story behind it.

Now that we’re curious, and we’re confident we can find an answer: why would the French language have ended up with bundles of twenty for counting, and not sets of ten like we use today in English?

Base 20 systems like the one used in France today for naming numbers go back a long, long way. These are called vigesimal systems, in contrast to the 10-based (decimal) systems we are all familiar with. The Franks—the ancestors of the modern French culture—didn’t use 20-based counting, but instead used a decimal system, just as we use today.

But the Gauls and Celts in the area used base twenty, and a great deal of the culture was embedded long before Latin had made its way to the area some 2000 years ago, as Julius Caesar set out to conquer Gaul under the Roman “republic.”

This vigesimal system, entrenched before the Roman conquest, persisted even as Latin and Roman cultural influences began to permeate Gaulish society, highlighting the resilience of local customs and linguistic traits.

Why base twenty? Some historians suggest practical reasons—counting using both fingers and toes, for instance. Others see a deeper cultural significance, a reflection of how these ancient societies structured their world.

What about the English language? Here’s a super easy example for you:

In his most famous speech, Abraham Lincoln used "four score" to refer to the 80 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Like most of the things Lincoln said, this choice of words was laden with purpose.

First, Lincoln chose language that honored the magnitude of the occasion. Thousands of Americans lay dead and hastily buried at Gettysburg, the site of an enormously important Civil War battle. These troops had just made the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the nation, and Lincoln understood the power of language to invoke solemnity.

Four score and seven years ago resonates with a rhythmic and poetic quality. It's a throwback to an older English usage where "score" meant 20, to a time when it was useful to bundle things in groups of twenty.

The word scor comes from the Old Norse skor, meaning a notch or tally mark. Tally sticks were commonly used for counting and record-keeping, with notches cut into a stick to represent numbers. Every twentieth notch or score would often be longer or more distinct, making it a significant unit in this system.

Language oddities like these—four score and quatre-vingt-dix-huit—are little windows into the past.

As a young kid taking French, I didn’t have the ability to look stuff up instantly, but I probably didn’t lack the mental capacity to devour new information. I was a curious kid, but felt like I had to leave a lot of those curiosities unanswered. There were many things I might never be able to know.

Today, there are way, way fewer things I don’t think I can figure out. The way we learn has been utterly transformed by the internet, and answers are a dime a dozen.

Back then, that feeling of frustration dominated whenever a question like this arose. Today, I almost always feel a sense of excitement and anticipation, because I know I’m going to find out why a thing is the way it is, and I’m probably going to uncover a great story along the way.

What sorts of questions have you answered recently? Are any of them language based, or are you curious about other word origins? Let’s think about this a little today.

I’ll leave you with this piece on another French phrase that intrigued me: