Danish has essentially managed to shorten "four and a half score" to what would be equivalent to saying "half to fives" in English. So it would be "two and half to fives" if we were to do the same in English. (This is also kinda similar to how the clock is read. 8:30 would be "half to nine" rather than "half past eight", which is used in English.)

France is “Four twenty twelve”, but if they had picked 99 it would be “four twenty ten nine”, which I always thought was funny.

In French, you count from 69 to 72 like "sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve". Then from 79 to 81 it goes "sixty-nineteen, four twenties, four twenties and one". Then from 89 to 91 it goes "four twenties and nine, four twenties and ten, four twenties and eleven".

It's not consistently vigesimal, though. Twenty is "vingt"*, thirty is "trente", forty is "quarante", fifty is "cinquante" and sixty is "soixante" - so far all normal. The only ones where they go all vigesimal on us are 70 (soixante-dix), 80 (quatre-vingts) and 90 (quatre-vingt-dix).

*etymologically "two-tens", if you go back beyond Latin: it's from Proto-Indo-European *dwi(h₁)dḱm̥ti

Swiss french too has cut a stop to that nonsense

They both came about in France around the same time, just influenced by Celtic/Germanic base-20 system or the romance base-10 system. Then France standardized to the ridiculous base-20 system and Belgium and Switzerland went with the correct system.

I worked hard to get mine and my kids telephone numbers under 70, it's half hell otherwise.

Say 92 87 78 97:

4 20 2 4 20 7 60 10 8 4 20 10 7

Easy peasy right 😁, well you do get the hang of it but it's easy to mess up somewhere in the middle, especially if you do have a real 20, 10, 4 and so on.

I've realized from this thread that I have a weird way of reading multiplication that feels very antiquated. I have nothing to add to your comment or the conversation, I just felt like it fits a bit here, where you referenced the antiquated "score" counting.

In my head, I don't read that as "four times twenty plus ten" it's "four by twenty plus ten"

I have no idea where that came from, and I need to ask family members if they do it too

Oh, interesting. Now I wonder, if that's why Germany and friends adopted it that way. We all imported our numerals from the arabs after all...

Suddenly... Sorok!

Large numbers aren't all multiples of 万 (i mean, everything is a multiple of something), Japan just uses the long scale myriad (ie 4 zeros to the comma). So you have 10 man, 100 man, 1000 man, and after that is oku, cho, etc, all of which go to 1000 before the next number word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad

ed: long scale is apparently different from 4 zeros to the comma

Just one guy, and that was a while ago

Denmark. They have a weird base 20 multiplication counting system. 90: halvfems (half fifth times 20, i.e., 4.5 × 20) so 92 would be tooghalvfems (2 + 4.5×20)