Comment Re:My wife is Finnish (Score 1) 287
Hey, my wife is also Finnish!
I feel your pain.
Where did you get the base-12 idea from? Indo-European languages also have decimal-based number systems (although the French twist it a bit with quatre-vingt-dix and suchlike). There are traditional numeral shorthands based on 2/pair, 12/dozen and 20/score, and time units hark back to the Babylonians, but they are normally expressed in decimal.
Fair enough, I was extrapolating too far here (and yes, from French, as well). It's just that 11 and 12 are given specific words in most European languages but Finnish doesn't.
Personally, I think Finnish is a 1.0 release, and is in dire need of several patches. Something definitely needs to be done about the partitive case, for instance. I have some grasp on most of the other cases (essive, inessive, adessive, illative, etc.), and the lack of definite and indefinite articles does not trouble me (studying Latin inured me to this particular quirk), but the partitive case regularly trips me up.
I think the Finnish language codebase needs a total rewrite. I'm a native speaker so I don't have to think about it, but just reading some rudimentary grammar can cause internal bleeding for me. And I couldn't explain "why", really. Funnily enough, the partitive can be used to define indefinite qualities/quantities a bit like the indefinite article. In some cases, of course.
And while we're on the subject of numbers, how come yksitoista means eleven, but puolitoista means one and a half? I propose that in Finnish v1.1, puolitoista would mean ten and a half...
It sort of makes sense... "toista" means "of the second" (kind of) so "yksitoista" would mean "1st of the 20th" (second "decade"), so puolitoista (extremely bad translation follows) "1st half of the second [number]". For instance, in English the expression "first decade of the 21th century" follows this logic (I think).
