--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "petusek" <petusek@...> wrote:
>
> >> presumed to be fairly recent in Finnish since the original FU
> >> speakers had a base 6 number system, [...]
>
> Did they? Can you give me some examples? Not that I object to
it, ...
> Petusek
I just restated from Nykysoumen Sanakirja by Häkkinen p 133.
It is also known that the numbers 1 to 6 are related in most Uralic
languages, but numbers above 7 are not, so base 10 counting seems to
have evolved later.
Why a base 6 system? If you count the fingers of one hand, 1-5 and
record this counts with a finger of the other hand, 6 will represent
the first finger of the other hand, 12 the next 18 the next, ...24,
36. So using 10 fingers one can count to 36.
Peter P