Nothing here is adopted. This page gathers what has been measured about ordinal numbers so the decision can be made on evidence.
It is on this list because of a measurement, not a wish: answering it would remove the need for nineteen roots, which no other open question can say.
The evidence
| Where | What stopped |
|---|---|
| Text 6 | a story told in days — ill seven days, medicine eight days — wanted on the eighth day and could only say for eight days |
| Story 2 | records it plainly: “the first morning” and “the second morning” cannot be told apart from “one morning” and “two mornings” |
| the days of the week | no name for any of them, and none needed if a day can be numbered |
| the months | no name for any of them, likewise |
Seven weekday names and twelve month names is nineteen roots. A language built on economy would number them, as Chinese does — 星期一, week-one — and as Japanese does with its months. It cannot, because numbering the second day is naming an ordinal.
The one candidate that is disqualified before it starts
An ending. -inci, -th, -ème. Every natural language the dictionary draws on has one, and Amadunia cannot: it has no affix at all — no conjugation, no plural ending, no case — and design rule 2 is that no word changes shape. An ordinal ending would be the first affix in the language, and the imperative was decided on exactly this ground: a distinct verb form was rejected outright for being an inflection.
What is left
| How it would work | Cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Position | a number before its noun counts, a number after it orders: du din is two days, din du is the second day | no new word, and no new kind of rule — the adjective, the owner and the demonstrative all follow their noun already, and the number is the only modifier that precedes |
| A particle | one new root before the number, like suda before a verb | a root, plus a position rule, plus a word in every date anybody says |
| A word for each | first, second, third as roots | unbounded; disqualified by the same argument that killed a plural ending |
| Nothing | the ambiguity stays and context carries it | free, and it leaves nineteen roots to find, two closed sets empty, and story 2’s complaint standing |
Position is the cheapest and it has a warning attached. Two sentences in the corpus had a number after its noun — Anak-anak du sini and Es hotel du sini — and both meant a count, not an order. They were corrected on September 4, 2026 and a check now refuses that shape. If position is adopted, the check is what would have to change, and those two sentences are the evidence that a writer reaches for the slot by accident.
The other warning is that position would carry meaning in a third way — after word order and after the copula’s noun-or-not — and each of those is a thing a learner has to hold.
What is measured and what is judgement
Measured: the two texts that stopped, the two empty sets, the nineteen roots, the absence of any affix in the language, and the two accidental uses of the slot that position would need.
Judgement, and the founder’s: whether the language orders numbers at all, and if so whether position is the way. Nothing here decides it.