Originally Posted By: The Pook
Hobbits have ten fingers just like us.


That would certainly tend to make one think decimal, but we do have remnants of a base twelve system lurking about in little hidey-holes in our language and it's a good system for fractional parts of the number represented by 10. Twelve is divisible by two, three, four, and six. The existence of a word for one more than ten that can have the -ty suffix does suggest that the base of the system is greater than ten. One way to derive a base twelve system from finger counting is to count on the knuckles.