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Re: Cardinals and ordinals

From:Matt Trinsic <trinsic@...>
Date:Friday, September 12, 2003, 18:27
> 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