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Just ran through Hungarian for a bit - lots of fun. Hungarian is easy as the numbering system is super consistent and logical. Though this just covers the cardinal numbers. The other types in Hungarian are quite different.


Really? Like what, for instance? I know that ordinal numbers are typically different in languages. Are there others?


Don't know about Hungarian, but in Russian I can think of at least four types of numerals:

- cardinal (what is the number?); for example, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat' (два, три, четыре, пять)

- ordinal (which position in a sequence?); for example, vtoroy, trety, chetvyorty, pyaty (второй, третий, четвёртый, пятый)

- collective (how many?); for example, dvoye, troye, chetvero, pyatero (двое, трое, четверо, пятеро)

- nominative (what is the number's name?); for example, dvoika, troika, chetvyorka, pyatyorka (двойка, тройка, четвёрка, пятёрка)


In Latin there are cardinals, ordinals, and also distributives, frequentatives, and according to some people multiplicatives (tres, tertius, terni, ter, triplex). Their meanings are something like:

three, third, three apiece, thrice, triple

These answer questions like: How many apples were there? Which one of the apples did you want? How were the apples distributed to the children? How many times did you count the apples? How has the apple population grown since last year?

At least for small numbers, English seems to have a distinctive form for each of these except for the distributive. But Latin will have many of these distinctive forms even for large numbers, like sescenties 'six hundred times' and octingentesimus 'eight hundredth'.

Edit: there's also some specialized vocabulary for fractions such as quadrans, sextans, octans, and even specific fractions like dodrans (3/4) and quincunx (5/12). But I'm not sure that these patterns are productive (generalizable) for larger denominators. Per Wikipedia, it looks like they're not, but quite a few have specific names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions

(I'd never heard of most of those! ... now I remember learning about the distributives for the first time at a spoken Latin event and remarking that numbers sounded surprisingly complicated in Latin, to which the organizer replied "dimidiam partem nescis!" 'you don't know the half of it!'.)


Cardinal, ordinal, fractional ordinal, numbers of people, Nth in a sequence and date in a month. This page explains it all with examples - http://www.hungarianreference.com/Numbers-cardinal-ordinal-s...




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