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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

One annoying thing about Finnish is that you have to say the whole year, no shortcuts. 1975 is "one thousand, nine hundred and seventy five" None of this nineteen-seventy-five efficiency nonsense. And, of course, you have to say it in Finnish numerals which are all looooong: vuosi yksi-tuhat-yhdeksänsataa-seitsemänkymmentä-viisi

Saatanan kyrpä, kun saavun numeron loppuun, en muista vitun alkun.

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Nah, doesn't work like that in practical (spoken) Finnish. Someone born in 1975 would be "seiskafemma", someone in 1984 "kasinelonen" and so forth. Even spelling the whole word out would be along the lines of "ysitoista seitenviis" (19 75). No-one would ever say "yksi-tuhat..."

> No-one would ever say "yksi-tuhat..."

They do on the TV (and, I assume, radio) news. But even they sometimes stumble over them, which leads me to further assume that the announcers only speak that way on the air.

What dialect is that wilihybrid? "seiskafemma"?

Stadin slangi?

Well, not the near-undecipherable real deal[1] Stadin Slangi, but just ordinary contemporary colloquial, I guess.

___

[1]: Near-half (old-fashioned) Swedish, near-half (old-fashioned) Russian, a tiny smattering of (old-fashioned) Finnish.

Hmm. I mean, "femma" is like a "fiver". "Seiska" is the nickname for the tabloid "7" (that became its official name). "Seiskafemma" though? Seems weird.

Yeah, "femma" is literally "fiver" in Swedish. (Or "fifth"; "Jag kom femma i loppet" means "I placed fifth in the race".) And "seiska" is the colloquial pronunciation of seven in general, not just that publication.

So "seiskafemma" is just the digita concatenated; "seven-five" in stead of "seventy-five". Doesn't feel all that weird to me. For one thing, other languages do that too. And for another, it's all the "-kymmenen" bits that are too long to pronounce, so leaving them out (when that doesn't introduce confusion, of course) seems eminently sensible. Really not weird at all.

Just a note, you wouldn't say yksi-tuhat, as just tuhat already implies "one". So rather tuhatyhdeksänsataaseitsemänkymmentäviisi or as I'd say it out loud, tuhatyheksänsataaseitkytviis.

Ok, fair point. You are correct. Removing it lets us reduce the monster by one point five syllables: vuosi tuhat-yhdeksänsataa-seitsemänkymmentä-viisi

Yes, you can shorten it, by deploying a kind of semi-sanctified mumbling they call puhekieli: tuhatyhekssataaseiskytviis

I make fun because I love

There are shortcuts, they're just different than those you have in English. 1975 for me would be vuos seittenviis, vuos seitkytviis, or vuos tuhatysiseittenviis. And if I wanted to say in the year ____, I'd just have to change vuos to vuon. The set of shortcuts you could use when writing in the literary variety is more constrained, however.

You can absolutely shorten pronunciation of numbers, including years, when speaking Finnish https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-vocabulary/vocabulary-lists/...

There's a legend that no Finnish ever says what the current year is; by the time they… finish, they're wrong.

Finns do commonly use nineteen-seventyfive, or even seiskaviis or seven-five, when it's clear what year it means. There are plenty of shortcuts. Only if you want to be "official" the whole number is said

You do exactly the same in Italian - I never found it inconvenient or annoying.

Same in French. I agree.

But in French, we skip 1900 in most 19xx years. I wonder when we'll start doing it for the 20xx years.

In Mandarin you can just say "one nine seven five"! Though you usually have to add "year" after that.

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