Re: Negative ordinality (was: Please welcome . . .)

Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 08:41:39PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> > I know - but then so, alas, is 'thirty-twoth' for my old fashioned
'thirty-
> > second'.
From Ray's msg I got the impression he's actually heard people say that, and
they weren't being funny-- it was an honest-to-goodness uage of theirs.

Nothing but tradition (and learning!) prevents us from analogizing -(e)th as
the ordinal ending for all numerals. I do it on occasion, but with the
verbal equivalent of a smiley or a wink.... In Future English, the ordinals
may all end in -th.

A fellow typist in the Army long ago for some reason had typed up a long
list of ordinals...it went "....18th, 19th, 20th, 21th, 22th, 23th,
24th......" We all had a good laugh, but he was mortified.  He knew better,
he just got carried away with the rhythm of the typing I suppose.

ObConlang:  In Kash, the decades are compounds of unit+ten (-fola); the /f/
> /p/ if the unit form ends in a consonant, and all except two and four do.
So they all have -pola except  rofola 20 and hafola 40.  I made so many
mistakes writing ropola and hapola, that I decided the language was
undergoing an analogical change. Though of course, purists frown on
ropola/hapola.

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