Hokkien word for 'one'

[Andrew]

It is quite common for Taiwanese to think that 二 is read nO, and they don't necessarily associate it with 兩 I think this is because children were taught to count "it, nO, saN" (一,兩,三) instead of "yi, er, san" or "yat, i, saam" (一,二,三) as in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Hi Ah-bin, it is interesting that in Taiwan children were taught that way. It is considered incorrect in my variant. I wonder if any other variants also count that way.

As Sim said, it should be it, ji, saN, or cit, nO, saN, but the latter is more common in counting/reciting.

[Ah-bin]

Actually......I meant to write "chit-nng-saN".... PhaiN-se lah

[SimL]

Drat! I spent a lot of Sunday working on my intended posting, but it still needs a little bit of work... Sometime this week, I promise

[SimL]

Well, I managed to get it done. It's still not as complete as I would like it, but I won't keep polishing it any longer.

I decided to make a new topic for it, so look there.

[SimL]

Hi Niuc,

I asked your question to a Malay friend of mine on the unilang chat. His (nick)name is "polar" (mine is "Tristan"), and this is what the (slightly edited version of the) chat looks like:

<Tristan> My friend was talking about cardinal numbers (one, two, three, four, five, etc) and ordinal numbers (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, etc) the other day and he had the following question about Indonesian...
<Tristan> "Only when I learned English then I knew the terms "Ordinal" & "Cardinal". Although Indonesian does have both (satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima ... & pertama, kedua, ketiga, keempat, kelima ...), in fact until now I don't know the proper terms for "Ordinal" & "Cardinal" in Bahasa Indonesia."
<polar> Tristan, the easy way is to use "ordinal"/"kardinal".
<polar> As far as i know, numbers are grouped under "Bilangan"..., so "Bilangan Ordinal", "Bilangan Kardinal".
<Tristan> Great, thanks! I'm sure he'll be very grateful for that... I'll just edit this chat a bit, and post it.

[niuc]

Hi Sim

Thank you for the answer. I really appreciate it!

Not to disappoint you, but they are not the "proper terms" I was looking for. Your friend (Polar) is right that the easiest way is to say "Bilangan Ordinal" and "Bilangan Kardinal". However, firstly they (Ordinal & Kardinal) are just transliteration from English, secondly I never heard of them being taught in schools (at least during my time). I also checked with some Indonesians and they were not taught that either. As a comparison, we were taught about "Deret Hitung"/"Deret Arimatika" (Arithmetic Sequence) and "Deret Ukur"/"Deret Geometri" (Geometric Sequence).

Since in Indonesian the Ordinal Numbers can be broken into "ke" + Cardinal Numbers (except the more common word for "first" i.e. "pertama" from Sanskrit -influenced word "pratama", cf. less used "kesatu" -> "ke"+"satu"), Indonesians most probably think of Ordinal Numbers as Cardinal Numbers (or in fact just Numbers) being used to point out a position among many. I think this is true for Chinese too, including Hokkien ('cit8' vs 'it4' and 'nng7' vs 'ji7' issue aside), as 第 + (Cardinal) Numbers.

[SimL]

You''re welcome, Niuc!

In fact, I edited out the part of the chat where I asked if there were "more native" words for these concepts (because I don't want to be a purist ). But I did ask, and polar said he didn't know of them.

Indonesians most probably think of Ordinal Numbers as Cardinal Numbers (or in fact just Numbers) being used to point out a position among many. I think this is true for Chinese too, including Hokkien ('cit8' vs 'it4' and 'nng7' vs 'ji7' issue aside), as 第 + (Cardinal) Numbers.

Now that I've thought a bit more about it, I'd venture to say that English speakers do too... Aside from "first" and "second" (and perhaps "third"), the others are also derived from the cardinal number by adding "-th". True, there is vowel change in the case of "five/fifth" (and one could perhaps class "three/third" as sort of in this category too - with a vowel change and the addition of a "-d" instead of a "-th"). So, perhaps I shouldn't have suggested in the first place that Hokkien shouldn't have two series, if English isn't that different, and does have... haha!