Thursday, June 11, 2015

Detail #171: Ordinals with Orientation

Consider English words such as topmost, foremost, leftmost, etc. It is easily imaginable for a language to have ordinals with mandatory marking for orientation, i.e. each ordinal has a morpheme that encodes the orientation of the set, and which end of the set the element is at. A few examples:

topmostfirst-[vertical, positive]
bottommostfirst-[vertical, negative]
hindmostfirst-[horizontal, away from observer, negative]
foremostfirst-[horizontal, away from observer, positive]

Of course, it's not unimaginable that this marking would be optional on most ordinals - maybe only first, second and third mandatorily mark for this, or maybe only the first ordinal in some kind of pragmatic unit need to specify orientation, and it's free for the rest.

As for the markers of the orientation, mayhap a combination of cases and possessives may work, i.e. "hindmost" would be formed as 'first-out-yours', whereas "foremost" is 'first-to-yours'.

2 comments:

  1. (Sorry if this comment has been sent more than once, my phone is behaving weirdly)

    Interesting, my Moten's ordinals can work exactly like that, on account of being relative ordinals that need an explicit word to indicate where the listing starts (as well as a mark of listing direction when it is relevant). So in Moten "topmost" is _fin |zaja_, literally "first from the top" (the mark of direction is omitted here as it is obvious from context).

    The Moten ordinals are an interesting feature that can be used in many ways, including spatially and temporally, not just for abstract lists.

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  2. Neat! Probably not the first time great minds have thought alike, but it does remind me that there's a great deal of creativity around in the conlanging world, and I probably need to go really crazy with ideas not to risk such accidental plagiarism.

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