this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Ordinal vs. cardinal. It's "first" not "onest", right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there's a difference. (In fact, it's basically a contraction of "foremost", and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)

If we weren't implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for "second" (and still not "onend" or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

programmer linguistigs is certainly something to behold.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Fun fact, Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories were and are the foundation of parsing.