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We are given the impression that “soirée”, “matinée” and “année” are for specific or even special occasions.
Why therefore, when talking about 1 000 000 years, does French prefer this form? Surely there are so many years here that we care little about them individually.
I'm not sure that soirée/matinée/année have to be about specific or special occasions but they have some properties setting them aside from soir/matin/an:
As for un million d'années, the problem might lie somewhere else altogether. The two following expressions would be ok:
But French has this strange thing with 1 000 000 which must be constructed as an NP taking the counted noun as an indefinite complement the same way un grand nombre does:
In general, ans seems to avoid indefinite plural contexts:
And so it happens that we get :
The longer form année does not imply a special occasion. It is used to stress the period's duration. Roughly speaking, an is the point in time (J'ai cinquante ans), and année is the period (Il faut compter une année pour voyager à Mars). The same goes for nuit/nuitée, matin/matinée, soir/soirée, jour/journée.
Note: a similar distinction is found in e.g. cuiller (or cuillère) vs cuillerée, where the former simply denotes a spoon, and the latter the volume it can contain (spoonful, as in recipes). Other examples include bouche/bouchée and bol/bolée. It is, generally speaking, a way of expressing an entity's extension in space or time.
