Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Gothic cardinal numerals/reply (6)

Cardinal numeral is not a distinct part of speech, I agree, but neither is transitive verb, and again, Category:English transitive verbs is a subset of Category:English verbs, not an independent topic category.

There are two approaches to the question I can see: the scientific/linguistic one ('do ordinal numbers form a grammatical category in any way' -> 'is there a grammatical construction that needs the label for its definition' / 'is there a property they all share') and the dictionary one ('what has traditionally been done with these sets of words', 'what is the most practical way to organize things so that someone looking for something here at Wiktionary will know where to look').

I find the first approach more interesting, but the second one is probably the more relevant one here at Wiktionary. I will therefore simply argue that people who look for a category including the words "cardinal" or "ordinal", given what we all learn at school (before we get to the university, learn linguistics and see the light) will probably look under grammatical categories, not topical ones.

As for ordinals including words that belong to other categories... indeed. But so do cardinals ('ten' can be a noun, and the two possibilities -- numeral and noun -- are listed as such here at [[ten]]). I'd argue that ordinals are similar: there are words that are ordinal and also something else (comparatives, superlatives, etc.). (I note "first" is a superlative only historicallly; synchronically, there is no reason to see it as such). So what would the problem be with having a ===Numeral=== heading for ordinals, followed by a ===Noun=== or ===Adjective=== or whatever else they can be qualified as (with the respective senses listed separately) -- just as is done at [[ten]]? And ordinals would then be categorized as "Ordinal numerals" and as "Nouns"/"Adjectives"/etc.

All in all... Look, I don't want to be difficult, or to fight old fights just out of some sense of 'knowing better'. If indeed Category:Latvian cardinal numerals has to become a topic category rather than a part-of-speech one, so be it. Even if I'm right and it does make it more difficult for the casual user to find the right category, I don't think the difficulty will be so big to be worth fighting about... So maybe it's better to simply ask: what is the model outline for a cardinal or ordinal number entry that you guys have decided to use? And what is the right categorization strategy? How should "five", "fifth", "one fifth" (and collective/nominal forms like "group of five", e.g. Russian "пятеро", which is not a noun, unlike English "pair" or "trio") be categorized? --Pereru (talk) 02:30, 14 August 2012 (UTC)