COMPTER - this is a counting joke for Vietnamese-French speakers…

In 1901, to fuel rapid building projects, the French colonial government in Indochina introduced a Corvée for all adult men. These labourers were expected to complete 30 days of unpaid work each year on government projects like roads, railways, sewers and other infrastructure. This was designed to capture poor populations who neither owned land or could be taxed a worthwhile amount on colonial duties imposed on commodities like rice, flour, salt, liquor, matches and opium. 

This video focuses on the awkwardness of counting between two numerical systems. The potential for small slips in concentration and accuracy when counting between the partial vignesimal French system of twenty (vignt) based numbers between 70-99) and the base-10 system of Vietnamese counting. 

Assumed to be uncivilised and inefficient by the west, several Asian languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese have a verbal counting system that is relatively simple to learn. For example words for eleven and twelve are ‘ten-one’ and ‘ten-two’ respectively. The clarity between syntax with numerical quantities has been studied in children by Mai Liên Lê and Marie-Pascale Noël (2022). The authors note that French-speaking children on average committed more lexical errors than Vietnamese-speaking children, and Vietnamese-speaking children tend to perform better than their French counterparts on verbal-and analog-Arabic transcoding tasks.