Re: YYMMDD (was: Re: Laadan)

En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

>
> I thought you were some kind of engineer?
Actually, I'm an Ir. (on my way to become a Dr. Ir. ;))) ). "Engineer" doesn't
really have the right connotation. But since the French is "ingénieur", that's
always how I translate it.

 Here at least, jokes about how
> an
> engineer's ordinals are "zeroth", "oneth", "twoth", "threeth", "fourth"
> etc
> are quite common.
>
LOL. Never heard them! Serious! But then, I'm a scientist, not a
technologist ;) .

> Similarly, one of the tell-tale signs to distinguish scientists from
> technologists is that the former start numbering things on "one", the
> latter
> on "zero". (Another is that scientist think that the area of a circle is
> pi
> times the radius squared, whereas technologists think it is pi times
> the
> diametre squared through four.)
>
So I'm definitely a scientist :))) . Also, my linguistic inclination makes me a
strange beast among scientific Ph.D. students ;)))) .

> Obconlang: The Tairezan word for "zeroth" is _dhaik_. Slightly
> irregular
> ordinal-formation from _dhaig_ "zero"; you'd expect **_dhaigek_ but
> there
> are quite a few instances where what should be _-gek_ or _-kek_ comes
> out as
> simply _-k_.
>
Maggel doesn't have a numeral "zero". Even its native digits don't know the
zero (they work a bit like Ancient Greek digits, using letters with a special
sign to them). It's not that they cannot express the zero, but they use another
mark for it (presumably a noun, like their high numbers are nouns too). So
since numerals, adjectives and nouns are different beasts in Maggel (I should
say "Parts of Speech", but in the case of Maggel the term "beast" fits
better!! ;))) Probably in their native terminology the term for "Part of
Speech" *is* "beast" ;))) ), you cannot form an ordinal from "zero". At best,
you can make an expression "at the rank zero" (same expression used for high
numbers which are rendered with nouns. Actually, a literal translation of the
expression would be "on zero ranks" :) ).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.