wandering wrote:I'm learning Estonian Numerals, there are enough resources talking about how to express the cardinal and ordinal INTEGER numbers, but there are so few literature about the decimal numbers.
Quite true! This is a really interesting question. I hope that Ainurakne will weigh in on this tomorrow because I'd like to know more about this topic, too. I've found that it's fairly difficult to learn how express various forms of numbers in Estonian for two reasons:
(1) In writing, they are nearly always written out with numbers rather than words, so reading Estonian text gives no practice with this nor gives any clue as to how they should be read aloud.
(2) That leaves spoken language to learn it from, but in spoken Estonian, numbers are often spoken in quite abbreviated forms that different from what would be written when the are written out fully.
So, although I've written a lengthy answer below, it's more to check my own understanding than to provide with a definitive answer to your questions. Let Ainurakne check it first and let us know!
wandering wrote:In Estonian, the decimal point is a comma, and thus the 'point' in English will be read 'koma' in Estonian. My questions are as follows:
(1) how to read the numbers after the decimal point?
-- always read them cipher by cipher (like in english 3.1415 = three point one four one five ...)?
-- or you can also read them as cardinal number when there are only few digits after decimal point (like 3.41 = three point forty one)?
Both:
3,41 =
kolm koma neli üks =
kolm koma nelikümmend üks3,14 =
kolm koma neliteist =
kolm koma üks neli With money, you can also say it this way rather than using the word
koma:
3,41€ =
kolm eurot nelikümmend üks senti 23,52€ =
kakskümmend kolm eurot viiskümmend kaks sentiWith longer numbers they are usually read individually:
3,1415 =
kolm koma üks neli üks viis3,14159265358979323 =
kolm koma üks neli üks viis üheksa kaks kuus viis kolm viis kaheksa üheksa seitse üheksa kolm kaks kolmJust like in English, breaking longer numbers up into chunks can cause problems in some circumstances:
3,405 =
kolm koma neli null viis, not *
kolm koma nelikümmend viis, which would be understood as 3.45.
Or at least, that's how I'd understand it. And yet in this video at 6:35, she reads 0,506 as "null koma viiskümmend kuus" and repeats it a moment later as "null koma viiskend kuus". Ainurakne, is this common to read this as viisk[ümm]end+kuus instead of reading it as viis+null+kuus? Is it correct? I'd be so confused if I heard it the way she said it without seeing what she had written. I would have thought she meant 0,56 instead of 0,506. wandering wrote:(2) There are three parts of the reading of the number, a) the digits before decimal point; b) the word 'koma'; c) the digits after decimal point. How to you decline each part?
-- say if the whole expression is in terminative case, should all the three parts be in terminative case?
The word
koma doesn't take the case ending.
That's the simple part of the answer.
Now for the other part... as far as the other two parts taking case endings or not, I have seen it both ways. I don't know if both are correct.
But also, remember that terminative and comitative case endings don't appear on adjectives and other descriptors. That makes terminative case a somewhat bad example compared to other cases.
So let's look at some other cases first, then come back to terminative:
I've found examples that do decline all of the elements of the number for case:
to 6.5 billion =
kuuele koma viiele miljardilebetween 0.3 and 0.6% =
ühe koma kolme ja ühe koma kuue protsendi vahelThe word
null doesn't change to
nulli even when the other numbers change case:
between 0.03 and 0.06% =
ühe koma null kolme ja ühe koma null kuue protsendi vahelI also found some examples that only decline the final number (along with the noun that it describes):
to 3.1% =
kolm koma ühele protsendilefrom 37.63€ =
kolmekümne seitsme koma kuuekümne kolmelt euroltto 41.34€ =
neljakümne ühe koma kolmekümne neljale euroleAre all of those examples correct, or are some improper usage? I don't know. Maybe Ainurakne can tell us how they sound to him.
Okay, back to terminative. What makes it different is that the case ending -ni normally gets added only to the final word, not to any descriptors that come earlier in the phrase. The same applies to decimal numbers.
I found these examples with the terminative case:
until 2,4 =
kahe koma neljaniuntil 53,6 =
viiekümne kolme koma kuueniup to 3.5% =
kolme koma viie protsendiniup to 18.8% =
kaheksateist koma kaheksa protsendiniAnd in the examples below you can contrast terminative case with ablative case and see that the ablative case portion of the example has the case ending on all the numbers (in the first example) and on the final number (in the second example) as well as the noun that follows it, which is the same two possibilities as what I described above. But in the terminative case portion the case ending is only on the word that comes at the very end:
from 8.5% to 8.3% =
kaheksalt koma viielt protsendilt kaheksa koma kolme protsendinifrom 3.1€ to 4.4€ =
kolm koma ühelt eurolt nelja koma nelja euroniwandering wrote:(3) How are following phrases translated?
-- 3.153 meters (in illative case)
-- 5.3 euros (in ablative case)
I'm not a native speaker, so let's let Ainurakne tell us how he would say these.
Most of my examples are from
Kõnesalvestuste brauser, which is a speech-to-text corpus generated from radio broadcasts. That makes it one of the few places you can see spoken numbers written out fully, but it could also have errors, because they are from a variety of sources and generated automatically. Plus, I searched for what I expected to find by typing in examples of what I thought was correct. It found examples of that usage, just as I asked it to. But if there are entirely different ways to say these numbers, even if they are more common than what I searched for, my search of the corpus wouldn't have found them.
Please correct my errors!