Talk:te ono

RFD discussion: December 2015–February 2016
Maori ordinal numbers don't really need or deserve their own entries; they're all SOP, formed from (the definite article) followed by the cardinal number in question. The creator of these entries does not seem to know any Maori. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:17, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Hmm.. what about four-th, six-th, thirteen-th etc. Or one hundred and one, one hundred and two, one hundred and three, one hundred and four, one hundred and five,...--Hekaheka (talk) 18:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * It's a regular feature of the grammar in this case. I doubt any Maori dictionary would list it separately (mine doesn't); it's just one of the functions of . —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 15:59, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Also, it's not specific to ordinal numbers- I would be surprised if te ono only meant first. It just happens that ordinals are nouns, and nouns can be definite, while adjectives (which are stative verbs in Maori) can't. In other words, the te isn't a lexical part of the construction, it's just part of the context. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:19, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep for three reasons: 1. per Hekaheka's 101 2. For structural reasons. (I.e. we have ordinals in all languages, I don't want just a few missing them.) 3. Most importantly, the reasonining given for deletion doesn't apply. I don't see how it's SOP that the + one produces 'first', as 'first guy that came' clearly is something else than 'the one guy that came'. Korn &#91;kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n&#93; (talk) 12:52, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The average speaker of English wouldn't understand why one would say mir ist übel instead of * ich fühle übel . That just means that you need to understand the grammar to use the correct words, or have a note at words like übel. As for needing ordinal numbers- we have those: ono is the ordinal number one, etc. What you're suggesting is like having an entry for mit einen Messer for the German instrumental case, or zwei Augen for the German dual number- other languages have those marked morphologically, so of course German has to. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:41, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
 * At no point do either the entry or Metaknowledge state that you can use a number as an ordinal without the article. So if ordinals must be formed by using te + number, I don't see any difference to English number + th, which is grammar you need to understand too. And yes, th is not a word and te is, but that makes no difference at all to me. Korn &#91;kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n&#93; (talk) 14:17, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Wegen always takes the genitive or dative in German. If German were like Maori, that would be expressed by a particle before what follows wegen. Would you create an entry for wegen + the particle, or would you include a usage note explaining that wegen always takes the dative or genitive, as you have now?
 * Now, how about some actual data: here are the entries at maoridictionary.co.nz for first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth. The first thing to note is that none of them include the article in the headword. All of them except for second say: "when used with this meaning it is preceded by te and followed by o" (second just says "(when preceded by te)."). In case you're wondering, o isn't part of the numeral phrase. It's a particle that sort of makes what follows possessed by or linked to or modifying what precedes it ... sort of. In some ways it reminds me of the role of the construct state in Hebrew. In other ways it's sort of like a conjunction. At any rate, that makes all but te rua wrong even by your standards. Then there's the matter of all the words with the numeral prefixed with tua-, such as tuatahi, which are also translated as first, second, third, etc., though they're not numerals (I'm a bit fuzzy on the distinction between the two types). Suffice it to say that the reality behind these is far more complicated and alien to European language conventions than initial appearances might indicate. I don't consider myself qualified to create ordinal-number entries in Maori, and I've actually studied one or two Polynesian languages. The person that added these did similar sets in a dozen other unrelated languages at the same time, and obviously doesn't know the first thing about this one. Chuck Entz (talk) 09:04, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
 * , are you explicitly in favour of deleting? In any case, I really wish more people actually familiar with Polynesian languages would comment. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:10, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Absolutely- DELETE!!!  .  It's hard for people who only speak highly-inflected languages to wrap their head around the fact that some other languages don't have lexically-significant ways of saying some things that are a basic part of inflected languages' morphology. . Maori ordinal numbers are like Finnish masculine or feminine pronouns: yes, you can express the concept, but it's not part of the structure of the language. Just as any translation of "he" or "she" would include some kind of word for male or female, so a translation of "first" or "second" would include the definite article. . Like Maori, German usually has a definite article in front of numbers when they're used ordinally- should we have an entry for der dritte or der Dritte? Chuck Entz (talk) 23:57, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Maybe the right people aren't aware of this: pinging . Chuck Entz (talk) 00:16, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Ditto Chuck's comments: Delete. The  preceding article and  following particle are grammatical requirements, and not lexically part of the ordinal term.
 * By way of comparison, Hawaiian is quite similar. The online Wehewehe Hawaiian dictionary has bilingual entries for second, fourth, and fifth illustrating the Hawaiian analog to the Māori construction.  A quick Google search confirms that the same construction can apparently be used for first as well.
 * My take on this: Polynesian ordinals and numerals are the same thing, differentiated not in form but in usage. Māori      translates out word-for-word into English as the six(th) of the trees.  When we talk about ordinals of something in English, we often use this same construction, the   of the (whatevers) -- but the  preceding article and  following preposition are similarly grammatical requirements, and not lexically part of the ordinal term.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 01:55, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * after e/c -- PS: The definite article necessarily indicates a singular referrent.  Māori has a separate term used as the definite article for a plural referrent, .  To talk about six trees out of a group of trees, one would instead say     .  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 02:04, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * [edit conflict] One thing ahead, then I'm back on topic: No, German does not usually have a definite article in front of numbers when they're used ordinally. German ordinals are regular adjectives and take or don't take an article as often as any other adjective. As for the wegen-example and Maroi: We actually do have an entry like the example you give there: trotzdem, rather than a usage note on "trotz", because the combination is just that common (as indicated by spaceless spelling). It's 100,00% SOP, even if written in one word. You could turn the entry into a usage note easily. But no dictionary does that, because simplicity. And that's where I'm coming from: From the way it gets described to me, ordinals are made by the fix phrase 'article [cardinal]o'. So it all comes down to the point I mentioned initially and which you've still failed to address: Can you use 'on' as an ordinal without the addition of an article 'te' and a particle 'o' or can you not? If you can, then I am for deleting it. If you can, but nobody would ever say it like that, then I'm for deleting it. However, if it is that specific phrasal combination which is required to turn a numeral into an ordinal sense, then yes, I am for keeping it, no matter how SOP and regular grammar it is, because that is exactly how I would want a dictionary to handle a matter like this as someone who wishes to inform himself on how an ordinal looks in Maori. You can always put a usage note there and say it's regular grammar and SOP and not actually a word, and what have you. Also: Translation targets anyway. I'm strictly against having red links in translation tables. This is not a Maori dictionary but an English dictionary. And English is a somewhat inflected language which does have ordinals and I don't see a point in greatly inconveniencing people by sticking fiercely to the internal system of a foreign language when talking about it. As long as the information we provide is not wrong. Korn &#91;kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n&#93; (talk) 02:03, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I fully support the notion that we should have something somewhere that can be linked to, as an explanation of the Māori ordinal construction. However, I don't think  etc. is the right place for this: anyone looking up  in English and clicking through to a translation in Māori would be just as well served by landing on the  page, provided that page explains how ordinal sense  and numeral sense  can both be conveyed using the term .  Having te tahi as a headword strikes me as much less useful: anyone unfamiliar enough with Māori to be looking things up word-by-word will have no reason to view the combined phrase as a single "term" for Wiktionary purposes, and will instead look up  and  separately.  Anyone more familiar with Māori will understand how numerals and ordinals in Māori are the same terms, just used differently.
 * Basically, I fail to see any usage case where a user would reasonably expect to look up te tahi and find something -- leaving me unable to see any rationale for maintaining an entry at that address, rather than simply including the relevant senses and usage information at instead.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 02:13, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

What about this as future state of affairs: --Hekaheka (talk) 07:59, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The Maori translation to "first", "second" etc. links to two words like this: te tahi
 * The Maori entry for "te" explains (as separate "sense") that it is used to make ordinals out of cardinals
 * There's no separate entry for etc.
 * These proposals all are sensible. But is breaking up key constructions which are SOP not internally incoherent when we include phrases like so far, além disso, et_cetera as single entries? Especially et cetera is both as SOP and as rigidly phrasal as it can get and seems very comparable to this situation. Korn &#91;kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n&#93; (talk) 13:16, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I object to 'structural reasons'. We shouldn't invent words for languages just to satisfy our own sense orderliness. Having said that, I have absolutely no idea on this specific issue. Renard Migrant (talk) 14:47, 16 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Re: Hekaheka's proposal, I think the information about ordinality belongs on the number term's entry, not under the entry for the singular definite article.  Ordinality is a property of a number, not of an article.  To analogize, English ordinals can often take, but the ordinality is not part of the article.
 * Looking deeper into this, one class of Māori ordinals is simply the number word preceded by singular definite article and frequently followed by possessive/genitive particle  and the pluralized noun indicating the group of things to which the singular ordinal belongs -- this is the main subject of this thread so far.  The second class is formed using, a Māori prefix commonly added to numbers 1 through 9 to create a different class of ordinals: , , , , , , , , .  These can be used after a noun to indicate the nth such noun:   ,   , etc.
 * Counterproposal: Add usage information to the number entries, , etc. to explain how to create ordinals using . Also, add entries for the  prefix and derived ordinals.  Otherwise, delete the entries of the form , , etc. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:11, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I support the counterproposal. It could also be a separate sense with something saying first for tahi DerekWinters (talk) 03:39, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Counterproposal sounds fine otherwise, but I think the entry for "te" should mention that it is used to make ordinals out of cardinals. If I understand Μετάknowledge correctly, "te" is the element that changes an ordinal to a cardinal - a bit like "-th" in English. The role of "the" in front of English ordinals is different. --Hekaheka (talk) 09:07, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * It's not just the that indicates whether a given number word is an ordinal: the whole context and construction is required to make that clear.  For instance, one can say   in Māori without indicating the six th , but rather the six:      .  Ordinality is again a function of the number word, and not of the definite article.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 10:21, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. The Maori construction te ono o... would mean "the sixth one of...", a noun-like construction. After a noun, ono may sometimes mean "sixth" even without an article. Polynesian numerals typically have many meanings, cardinal and ordinal. Notice that te rua also means "the pit, the cavity", besides "the second one" and "the two". The fact that te ono &co are defined as adjectives is a proof that the creator of these entries did not know much about Polynesian grammar. I support Eirikr's counterproposal. --Makaokalani (talk) 14:39, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
 * All right, delete. --Hekaheka (talk) 22:12, 18 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I've added an entry for the Māori prefix . Please alter or expand as appropriate.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 17:03, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Eirikr. RFD failed. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:16, 1 February 2016 (UTC)