Re: Cardinals and ordinals

Isidora Zamora sikyal:

> Janko's request for numerals got me thinking about something.  In all the
> languages that I know the numerals of (admittedly that's not many: English,
> Danish, Latin, Russian, Church Slavonic, and maybe I've missed
> one.  They're all Indo-European in any case.) there is an irregularity in
> some of the early ordinal numerals.  The ordinals are generally derived
> from the cardinals by a regular process (in the case of English, by adding
> -th), but the first few seem not to be derived at all or are derived
> irregularly.  (English "third" is derived irregularly and "first" and
> "second" appear not to be derived at all from the corresponding
> cardinals.  Church Slavonic "edin"/"pervyj" and "dva"/"vtoryj" bear no
> resemblance to each other, but the ordinals do eventually regularize.)
>
> How widespread is this phenomenon?
It applies also to Semetic langs, I beleive, and is of course ubiquitous
in IE langs. In Thai there is a separate word for "first", IIRC, but
otherwise ordinals are not differentiated from counting numbers.

> What sorts of ways do various languages have of forming the ordinal
> numerals?  (I'm especially interested in processes that are different from
> the ones that I have seen.)
Yivrian isn't especially innovative in this respect: the ordinal ending is
simple adjectival -il, which all ordinals use. The stems for "one" and
"two" are irregular, though: counting numbers 1 and 2 are /ba/ and /sim/,
while the ordinals 1st and 2nd are /aisil/ and /sindil/.

Romanian is somewhat unusual in this respect. The noun qualified
by the ordinal must be definite, and is followed by the genitive
article 'al'. Then the numeral occurs in a strange genitive form
made with -a. Only "prim" meaning "first" doesn't follow this pattern. The
 ordinal/genitive numerals are:

prim (unu)
al doilea (doi)
al treilea (trei)
al patra (patru)
al cincea (cinci)
al s,asea (s,ase)
al s,aptea (s,apte)
al opta (opt)
al noua (nou�)
al zecea (zece)


--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"