And a one, and a two…
There’s a small mystery about numbers that you may have noticed. When we count things, we use “one,” “two,” “three,” and so on. But when we talk about the position of something in a sequence, we say “first,” “second,, and “third;” different words altogether. After that, though, it’s back to “FOURth,” “FIFth,” “SIXth,” etc, and those are just the original numbers with “th” appended.
The first thing that’s going on is the difference between “ordinal” and “cardinal” numbers. “Ordinal” comes from the Latin “ordo”, which means series (or “row”). Most ordinals in English are based on the Old English suffix “tha;” nowadays we’ve dropped the “a” but still retain the “th” as in “seventh” and so on.
Nobody knows why, but even though ordinals are formed with an Old English rule, the initial ordinal, “first,” comes from the Germanic root word “furisto.” That was in turn based on “fur,” which means “before” (that’s where the “fore” comes from in “before”, by the way). “Furisto” is the “superlative” form of “fur,” meaning before everything. In Old English that became “fyrst,” and that’s where our “first” is from.
Long sequences, in the olden days, didn’t apparently matter all that much, because the original word for what came after whatever was “first” was just “other.” Maybe that scene with the Holy Hand Grenade in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was more realistic than you thought, eh? But by about the 1300s it was becoming clear that “first, other” was just not going to suffice. Luckily by then Middle English had arrived, along with its tendency to include French words, and sure enough, French had exactly what English needed: “second.” “Second” comes from the Latin “secundus” (following).
When we get to “third” it begins to sound like there’s at least a bit of resemblance between the ordinal and the cardinal “three.” That’s because “third” comes from the Germanic root “thridda,” which iis closely related to “three.” The biggest difference is the position of the “r” — that occurred in the 1500s; before that “third” in English was “thrid” — and “thirteen” was probably “thriteen” as well. It turns out that the process of letters (sounds, really) reversing their positions like that is not uncommon in historical linguistics; it’s called “metathesis.” Just wait; “nucular” might eventually be preferred to “nuclear.”
“Cardinal” comes from the Latin word “cardinalis,” meaning primary or essential. It also means “hinge” because it’s based on the latin “cardo” (a door hinge). Even today we talk about something “hinging on” a principal factor. The cardinal numbers are called that because “one,” “two” and so on are the primary names for numbers. It’s also why a very high official in the Catholic church (which is all in on Latin) is called a “Cardinal.” There’s also a bird called a “cardinal,” of course, and “cardinal” also means a shade of red. Those meanings come from the color of the robes traditionally worn by the church version of a Cardinal.
There’s a religious angle to “ordinal” as well. Remember that “ordinal” comes from the Latin “ordo.”. Another Latin word related to “ordo” is “ordinare”, meaning to put in order, arrange, or appoint. From “ordinare” English gets “ordain”, which is the process of appointing a priest or minister of a church. “Ordinary”, which to us means normal or usual, refers to things being in their normal order.
This whole discussion may seem like a bit of an ordeal, but not to worry; “ordeal” doesn’t come from “ordo.” It’s derived from a different source altogether: the Old High German word “urteil” (judgement). And just to toss in another gratuitous Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference, they way they made judgements back then was often by some sort of completely arbitrary test, such as comparing the weight of a woman to a duck, or (more to the point for “ordeal”), by inflicting physical pain or hardship. Nowadays an “ordeal” is just the unpleasant part without any relevant judgement at the end — which really is pretty much the way it was then too, in effect.
