2023-11-11 08:02:36
This has given many primary school pupils a hard time, but, believe it, their teachers too. French is particularly crooked when it comes to numbers. In fact, it’s not that the rules are very complicated, but more that our brains persist in rejecting them. We calm down and take everything back.
Cardinal numeral adjectives: quantity
One, two, five, six, twelve, thirty, a thousand: all these words are cardinal numeral adjectives. They are used to express quantity and are invariable. We will therefore write “there are twelve apples” and in no case “there are twelve apples” (try it to see how excited your spelling checker is at the sight of this outrageous “s”).
Vincent’s problem
Problems arise with compound numeral adjectives containing “twenty” and “one hundred”. Thus, if they are subject to multiplication, 20 and 100 take an “s”:
eighty (4 x 20); five hundred (5 x 100).
Except when they are followed by another numeral adjective:
ninety-three; five hundred and thirty-two; seven hundred thousand.
Et except when they have an ordinal value:
the years one thousand nine hundred and eighty; page five hundred of my novel; eighty rue de l’Académie.
You can memorize the following sentence “Vincent agrees when he multiplies, except when he is followed and enters orders”.
Large quantities agree
Million, billion, billion and trillion agree for a simple reason: they are nouns and not adjectives. For what ? Just to annoy you, but that’s how it is.
Ordinal numeral adjectives
First, second, twelfth, thirtieth, hundredth, thousandth, millionth: whatever your position in the race, you agree to:
The first cold weather has arrived. Remember once and for all that the runners-up always lose. The fiftieth Olympic Games have officially begun.
#number #adjectives #agree