Re: Cardinals and ordinals

Staving Isidora Zamora:
>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.)
"Second" comes from the Latin "secundus", meaning "following".

Khangaþyagon is rather regular in its ordinals. It simply adds the
adjectivising suffix "-ek" to the cardinal. Mind you, this creates a
semantic irregularity in the meaning of "-ek", which usually means "like",
so would suggest "single, double, triple" etc. At some point, I'll have to
create a suffix with the meaning "-fold".
Khangaþyagon's irregularities are all semantic irregularities by the way.

Pete