Re: Types of numerals

Hello!

On 1/7/06, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
[snip]
> Carsten Becker wrote:
>  > As for getting rid of one and two pence pieces, I wouldn't
>  > mind doing that here in the Euro zone as well. It's so
>  > annoying that when buying something at a drug store, you
>  > will ALWAYS get one cent change because *all* of their
>  > prices are X.99 EUR. And then you've got half a dozen
>  > pennies in your wallet and cannot get rid of them because
>  > hardly anybody accepts them.
>
> Even in increments of one or two?  That surprises me!  If they give them
> out, why wouldn't they accept them?  Seems counterproductive to me.
> You'd run out of pennies in your till pretty damn fast.
AFAIK they *have* to accept them. These coins are legal tender in the
Euro zone, after all...

There are probably some sort of rules, though: something along the
lines of "shops may refuse to accept payment of sums exceeding 1 EUR
in one-cent coins, exceeding 2 EUR in two-cent coins, ..."; or maybe
simply "shops may refuse to accept amounts of coins exceeding 100 as
payment for any single purchase". I'm pretty sure I remember rules of
this kind from pre-Euro Germany; I don't know how binding they were,
though (AFAIR they weren't part of an actual law, but I may be wrong
about this), and of course I don't remember any actual numbers.

But at the very least, they should allow you to buy something that's
(say) 1.24 EUR using a one-Euro coin, a twenty-cent coin, and four
one-cent coins. :-/


On the other hand, we don't have any one- or two-cent coins here in
Finland -- at least not officially. They do mint them, but only in
small numbers, and the coins aren't used as currency; they go directly
to the numismatic stores (where they're selling them for much more
than their nominal value). Prices in shops are usually
something-point-something-zero or something-point-something-five, and
those that aren't are rounded (prices ending in 1, 2, 6, or 7 are
rounded down to the nearest 0 or 5, and prices ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9
are rounded up). If you use cash, that is; if you use a credit card,
for example, you always pay the exact price. I assume that some
reeeeeally clever people out there take great care to use their credit
card for anything that would be rounded up and pay everything else in
cash, and then they brag about all the pennies they're saving. ;-)

A friend of mine, a fellow German-living-in-Finland, travels between
Germany and Finland quite frequently, so she usually has insane (to
Finns, anyway) amounts of one- and two-cent coins. When some
salesperson annoys her (with sloppy service or whatever), she uses
these coins to annoy them right back... Even in Finland these small
coins are legal tender and have to be accepted as such. (You still
have to pay the rounded prices, though.) My friend seems to enjoy
fighting with salespersons over whether or not they have to accept her
"funny foreign" money -- well, of course she does, since she
inevitably wins these fights... after gleefully watching her opponents
look up obscure financial laws in thick books, phoning the bank, and
so on. ;-)

> One really has to wonder what the EU was thinking setting the Euro at a
> value that made .01 so nearly worthless.  They should've set it at about
> 5 times that value, so that a 1-cent piece would've been more worthwhile.
You call that worthless? Hah! The Finnish pre-Euro currency, the
markka, was worth about 1/6 of a Euro, and nevertheless it was divided
into 100 even smaller units called penni. (To be fair, the smallest
coin I've ever seen outside a coin collection was the 10-penni coin.
But still...)


ObConlang: During my winter holidays, I finally had time for some
serious linguisting, and I've started working on my first Sakwosin
sentences (woo hoo!). The language is turning out to be a little more
strongly incorporating than I'd expected, but it seems to work so far.
I just hope this is not a symptom of the dreaded "first conlang
syndrome"... you know, that compulsion to cram all those exciting
features that your native language lacks into your first conlang...
*sigh* Oh well. At least Sakwosin isn't ergative. ;-)

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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