Re: Cardinals and ordinals

Isidora Zamora scripsit:

> 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.
That's only natural, since they are far and away the most frequently used, and
so the most likely to be sound-changed as separate words rather than being
rebuilt by the rules engine when needed, the way "twenty-seventh" is.

> (English "third" is derived irregularly and "first" and
> "second" appear not to be derived at all from the corresponding
> cardinals.
"Second" is a borrowing of the Latin ordinal "secundus" (via French),
which is itself a semantic transfer from its basic meaning of "following".
In the Latin Bible, the Gospels are labeled things like "Secundus Marcus",
meaning not "the second Mark" but "according to [i.e., following] Mark".

"First" is obviously a superlative, like two other words which pattern
as ordinals but have superlative roots, namely "last" (sup. of "late")
and "next" (sup. of "nigh"; the comparative, interestingly, is "near").
There doesn't seem to be any surviving form of the adjective underlying
"first", though m-w.com says the root is that of "fare", i.e. that
which precedes.

> How widespread is this phenomenon?
Gotta be all over the place.  The story of the German ordinals is
interesting: the suffix is -st, which is the *same* as that of the
superlative.  This is apparently a calque on early Romance sound changes
which collapsed the Latin superlative ending -issimus with the only
partly analyzable -esimus in vicesimus (20th), tresimus (30th), etc.
The Germans apparently got the idea that the Walha said "twentiest",
"thirtiest", and decided to do the same in their own "people's"
(i.e. "theodiscus") language.

> 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.)
In Chinese it's a prefix, which I think is very clever.

--
Principles.  You can't say A is         John Cowan <jcowan@...>
made of B or vice versa.  All mass      http://www.reutershealth.com
is interaction.  --Richard Feynman      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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