2750: Why ‘First’ and ‘One’ Are So Different Across Languages Jul 1, 2024

When it comes to going from cardinal numbers to ordinal numbers, languages usually modify the name for the number with an affix and perhaps minor phonetic changes, such as in English four → fourth; twelve → twelfth. What is also usual is that the words for “first; second; third” are also commonly more different to their cardinal counterparts, and even more notable, ‘first’, and its cross-language equivalents are not merely irregular, but often have a completely different root for ‘one’. This is true of languages all over the world, completely unrelated to each other, though this is by no means a rule.

While the question of why can be frustrating in a social science like linguistics; it is easy to understand that the most frequently used terms are the most likely to become irregular, but not about different etymologies altogether. For instance:

One   -  First [English]

Unus   -   Primus [Latin]

Moja - Kwanza [Swahili]

Tʼááłáʼí  -   Áłtsé [Navajo]

אחד  -  ראשון (echad - rishon) [Hebrew]

واحد  -  أول (wahid - ‘awal) [Arabic]

하나   -  첫 번째 (Hana - Cheos beonjjae) [Korean]

ஒன்று   -  முதலில்  (Oṉṟu  -  mutalil) [Tamil]
All of these languages, unrelated to each other and across continents, not only have irregular forms for this pairing—which they do—but completely different origins. For many of these other words, the sense is not only ordinal, but of leadership. The English ‘first’ is from a very old Germanic root related to the Dutch ‘vorste’ and German ‘Fürst’ meaning ‘chief; prince’. In Hebrew the word is from ראש (rosh) meaning ‘head’ which can be used in the sense of leadership just as English. This is true in a certain way in Latin ‘primus’ from prae (before) and the superlative suffix -issimus (i.e. “most eminent”). Arabic is perhaps the most peculiar case of this happening. This is from a pagan deity name who is the head of the pre-Islamic Arabian pantheon. The root also has some sense of ‘top’.

The Navajo áłtsé also means ‘before’, and likewise ‘kwanza’ is a participle meaning ‘beginning’, and unlike the other words in the list above, is not used in larger number, e.g. “twenty-first” is “ishirini na moja”, using the cardinal number 1.

Of course, there are plenty of languages like Mandarin and Kyrgyz where the word for ‘first’ fits into the same template as every other ordinal number, but the high number of disparate terms may be simply from the fact that a word like ‘third’ that it is preceded by two, the first in a set is apropos of nothing and doesn’t need to fit into a pattern.