Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Gothic cardinal numerals/reply (5)

Cardinal numeral may be a subset of it, but it is not a distinct part of speech. In Gothic for example, all numerals are words for cardinal numbers, there is no such thing as an "ordinal numeral" in Gothic.

2 and two are both numerals but of a different kind. Two is a numeral word while 2 is a numeral symbol. I actually wanted to keep numbers in a part-of-speech like category. But it was argued that those words are not themselves numbers, they refer to numbers in the same way that toponyms refer to places. The word London isn't a place, it's a word referring to a place. In the same way, two is not a number, it refers to one. What distinguishes cardinals from ordinals is that they refer to numbers in different ways. Words for cardinal numbers indicate the size of a set (which is unordered) while words for ordinal numbers indicate the relative position in a list (which is ordered).

Unfortunately, the current category for numeral symbols is called "numbers", mixing the two kinds of words together. The move I am doing right now is partly an attempt to separate the two kinds. But the category for numerical symbols will need to be renamed sometime in the future, too.

Ordinals do form a coherent grammatical category... but that category contains more than just ordinals, since they don't have their own 'special place' grammatically - there is little grammatically that separates other modifying words (like adjectives) from ordinal number words. It is no coincidence that in for example English and Dutch the ordinal "first" has the same inflection as a superlative adjective, and in Gothic the word for "first" is a comparative. Ordinals typically serve to lift out a specimen with a particular property, which is also what comparatives and superlatives do.

Participles are a different matter... they behave like a mix between verbs and adjectives, and the idea of calling "participle" a separate part of speech is an attempt to find a single cover term to describe words that show both of those behaviours together.