NUM: numeral
Definition
A numeral is a word, functioning most typically as a determiner, adjective, or pronoun, that expresses a number and a relation to the number, such as quantity, sequence, frequency or fraction.
Note that cardinal numerals are covered by NUM whether they are used as determiners or not (as in Windows 7) and whether they are expressed as words (չորս)/(čors), digits (4), Roman numerals (IV), or Armenian letters (Դ). Other words functioning as determiners, including pronominal quantifiers: interrogative and relative (քանի/k’ani “how many”); demonstrative (այսքան/aysk’an “this many”); indefinite (քանի մը/k’ani më “several”); definite (բոլոր/bolor “all”, ամբողջ/amboġǰ “whole”) are tagged DET.
Note that some words that may be traditionally called numerals, are not tagged NUM, based on their syntactic and morphological behavior.
Note that Western Armenian does not have a productive class of adverbial ordinal numerals and multiplicative numerals.
If a numeral inflects as a noun, it is tagged NOUN.
Examples
- 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2014, 1000000, 3.14159265359
- I, II, III, IV, V, MMXIV
- մէկ/mēk “one”, երկու/erkow “two”, երեք/erek’ “three”, չորս/čors “four”, հինգ/hing “five”, եօթանասուն/eòt’anasown “seventy”
- Ա, Ժ, Է, ԺԱ, Ն, Ռ “1, 10, 7, 11, 400, 1000”
- կէս/kēs “one-half”, քառորդ/k’aṙord “quarter”: denominators of fractions constitute a separate class of cardinal numerals.
Counterexamples
- առաջին/aṙaǰin “first”, երկրորդ/erkrord “second”, երրորդ/errord “third”: adjectival ordinal numerals. They are tagged ADJ, and the NumType feature reveals their semantic relation to numbers.
- մէկ-մէկ/mēk-mēk “one at a time”, երկու-երկու/erkow-erkow “two at a time”, երեք-երեք/erek’-erek’ “three at a time”: adverbial distributive numerals. They are tagged ADV, and the NumType feature reveals their semantic relation to numbers.
- մէկ/mēk “number one”, երկուս/erkows “number two”, երեք/erek’ “number three”, չորս/čors “number four”, հինգ/hing “number five”: names of numbers, or of objects identified by the number (e.g. of a bus route). They are not considered numerals and they are tagged NOUN.
Border cases
- երիցս/eric’s “thrice”, չորիցս/čoric’s “four times”, բազմիցս/bazmic’s “many times”, եռապատիկ/eṙapatik “threefold”, քառապատիկ/k’aṙapatik “fourfold”, բազմապատիկ/bazmapatik “n-fold”, երրակի/erraki “triple”, քառակի/k’aṙaki “quadruple”, բազմակի/bazmaki “n-tuples, multiple” are not considered numerals in the Western Armenian grammar. They are tagged either ADJ or ADV.
- տասնեակ/tasneak “a ten”, հարիւրեակ/haryowreak “a hundred”, հնգանոց/hnganoc’ “five-note”, իննոց/innoc’ “nine-note”, 20-ական/20-akan “by twenty”, 30-ական թուականներ/30-akan t’owakanner “thirties” are not considered numerals in the Western Armenian grammar. They are tagged either ADJ or NOUN.
- հարիւրավոր/hariwravor “hundreds of”, հազարավոր/hazaravor “thousands of”, միլիոնավոր/milionavor “millions of”, միլիարդավոր/miliardavor “billions of”: expressions -s of, for instance, in phrases like հազարավոր մարդիկ էին դուրս եկել փողոց/hazaravor mardik ēin dowrs ekel p’oġoc’ “thousands of people had taken to the streets” are adjectives and tagged ADJ.
- հարիւր/hariwr “hundred”, հազար/hazar “thousand”: words for large quantities are ambiguous between cardinal numerals (tagged
NUM) and nouns. If they inflect as nouns, they are tagged NOUN, but the distinction is not always clear-cut. For instance, in phrases like հազար ասացի/hazar asac’i “I told it a thousand times” lit. I told thousand, հազար մարդ/hazar mard “thousand people” (when it denotes an indefinite large quantity rather than an exact numeric value), հազար/hazar is a noun. In exact numeric expressions, e.g. 110 հազար դոլար/110 hazar dolar “110 thousand dollars”, it is a cardinal numeral (see specific syntax).
NUM in other languages: [axm] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hbo] [hu] [hy] [hyw] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [naq] [no] [oge] [pal] [pcm] [ps] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [xcl] [xmf] [yue] [zh]