I disagree that it was VERY old-fashioned. As someone who's been
very interested in number-words and their history for quite a long time,
let me expand on this. Most of the major European languages had a
break after 60, which usually had a special name of its own ; for example,
it was a "shock" in English before it became "three score". In Elizabethan
times, the standard names for 60,70,80,90 were
"threescore", "threescore and ten", "fourscore" and "fourscore and ten"
and the other European languages did much the same thing.
Now this was indeed a BIT old-fashioned when Lincoln spoke, but his
hearers certainly wouldn't need to "work it out", since it was kept very
much alive for them by the Bible's use of "threescore and ten" for man's
alloted span, for example. It was in fact a not uncommon usage right up
to and including the present century both here and in England, particularly
in sermons and formal speeches (like Lincoln's), and in giving ages - I
remember a Lincolnshire man's giving his age to me quite naturally as
"threescore and twelve", for instance.
About "four-and-twenty" and the like: in certain parts of England
this is still in use, particularly in giving times. In the Cambridgeshire
village where I lived for about 15 years, perhaps about half the
"village-folk" would say "five-and-twenty past four", for example.
I think that the forms "soixante" and "septante" had already supplanted
the older ones about 200 years ago, but wouldn't be surprised to hear
that the latter have survived in a few usages. As Richard Guy and I say
in our "Book of Numbers", the regularized forms "huitante" and "nonante"
for 80 and 90 have been used in a few places. You should probably
be able to find details in Menninger's book on number words and symbols.
(I have some other books on such topics whose names I can't quite
remember - my copies are in French and German, but I think two of them
have been translated into English - I should be able to dig them out
if anyone's interested.)
John Conway