Re: Cardinals and ordinals

> From:  Isidora Zamora <isidora@Z...>
> Date:  Fri Sep 12, 2003  2:47 pm
> Subject:  Cardinals and ordinals
>
> 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?
>
> 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.)
>
> Isidora
        Just for the fun of it, when I designed slaleg ekryn I completely left
out the cardinal numbers. The ordinal numbers only exists as modifier
words. So far this lack hasnt caused any major problems (although I
havent attempted tranlating any complex mathematical ideas yet).
        Does anyone have any idea if there are any Nat-langs that similarly
fail to have cardinals?

~Trinsic