Some Ideas Regarding Ordinal Numbers

One morphological way of forming ordinal numbers that somehow makes sense would be the verbal perfect aspect marker or a perfect, active participle. Consider 'the fourth item' is the item that 'brings' the number to four, thus the item that 'reached' four, the item that caused the items to number as much as four.

However, there are other things to do with ordinals than just their formation. We can consider what other things than numbers can take ordinal marking. In Finnish, the word 'monta' (many) permits forming an ordinal - mones (manyeth), which mainly is used in combination with the interrogative particle -ko. Monesko? 'How manyeth?' Of course, we could imagine a language that has forms like:

I don't recall which, but in someth part of that series they really jump the shark.

He's not the first to do this, but at least fewth.

One could maybe extend it to meanings like 'every so many|often|':

the oftenth day, we throw a party.

no matter the manieth the ephemeral obsessions of the youth, there will always be a next.

Of course, next is sort of ordinal-like as well, and one could also imagine offset-ordinals: the n:th from this one, as well as periodically offset-ordinals: every n:th from this one, (versus every n:th).

But, to go further and create some semantic fun, consider a language where ordinals can go on both sides of their noun.

the n:th thing := the thing that is n:th in order
the thing n:th := a thing that completes a culturally sort of significant set of that particular type of thing; i.e. 'the seventh out of a set of seven unfortunate events', the third out of three deaths in a village in a short span of time, the twelfth month out of a year, the sixth beer in a six-pack - so month twelfth, death third, disaster seventh would all be somewhat grammaticalized phrases.

But we could go on even further. Any out of these nouns, if in the plural with the ordinal after it, would signify the whole set of months or disasters; with the ordinal in the plural, it would be such sets of months or disasters or six-packs.