Re: LUNATIC again

Lojbab wrote:

>The classic example of this is again from old TLI Loglan.  JCB's book on the
>language gives two examples of number+ordinal_suffix. (e,g, in English 9-th
>being made from the word for nine and the ordinal suffix.  But Loglan/Lojban
>has some "numbers" that are not integers, such as "a few", "many", "all",
>and "enough".  So JCB gives the example of the enough-th, a position in a
>movie line sufficient to be admitted to the theater before the show starts.
>The all-th ends up equivalent to English "last" but obviously has a
>different flavor in following this pattern.
>
>People not  all that much into Loglan/Lojban have been struck by this
>non-Englishism, and remember it for years afterwards even if they remember
>little else.  And sometimes they find indefinite number ordinals in places
>where English has no word.
I like this little non-Englishism too!  Coincidentally, the ordinal prefix
"pe-" in Tokana is used with a handful of non-number words to form nouns
denoting various people/places/things/times in a sequence:

        pehkai          "the first one"
        pehise          "the next one, the following one"
        pekame          "the last one, the previous one"
        pekunthe        "the last one, the final one"

The roots of these words are not productive in Tokana, however.
"Pehkai" is derived from the root "hkai", which occurs in a handful of
words having to do with the origin or beginning of something:

        ihkai           "from the first moment, from the start"
        Ahkaion         "the first Human Being"

"Pekame" is from the root "kam", which also refers to origins:

        kame            "matrilineal clan"
        kameun          "starting point"
        ahkame          "full sibling"

Perhaps I could extend the use of the "pe-" prefix to quantifiers as well:

        pemulhte        "the enough-th one"
        pemiote         "the whole-th one"
                        (i.e. the one that completes the set, connotatively
                        different from "last")
        pemiante        "the how-many-th one?"

And so on.  A neat idea...

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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