# Séptimo, octavo, décimo: why relatinized?



## ahvalj

Spanish (and to a lesser extent some other Romance languages) has replaced a number of its inherited ordinal numerals with their Latin prototypes, so that octavo has took the place of ochavo, décimo of diezmo and so on. What was the driving force of this replacement and how  did codifiers of the language convince laypeople to use the newly introduced bookish forms?


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## fdb

In French all the ordinals are inherited apart from "second". In English too they are all native apart from "second". Is there any logic to this?


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## Penyafort

Rather than a replacement, I rather guess there was a long period of coexistence of several forms (forms in -eno like seteno were very used), with a relatinizing wave trying to make things more coherent. In most of the languages, Latin ordinals from one to ten were quite used. If anything, French is the exception.

But I concur that Spanish is particularly difficult when it comes to ordinals nowadays. I don't agree, though, that your ordinary guy was convinced to use them. That is why most people only use them from 1 to 10. French and English use ordinals to call the centuries (le dix-huitième siècle, the twentieth century), Spanish doesn't (el siglo doce, el siglo veinte).


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## ahvalj

The French ordinals are anyway reshaped in the Middle French period after -isme×-esme (d-ecimum×vīg-ēsimum). Premier looks inherited to me, second with its g looks Occitan. That all was natural development, which can be registered but not explained. The Spanish ordinal numerals were reverted to their more or less original Latin sound because of fashion, and the steps and motivation of this process may be reflected in the sources. How did the, originally, I guess, joking way of speaking spread from scholars to the street? What did the shopkeeper answer when the student asked her for the first time una décima parte instead of una diezma parte? Well, octavo pro ochavo can be deduced, but vigésimo pro something like veismo was originally totally obscure to the people. How did it all happen and evolve?

[Changed a dash position: de-cimum>d-ecimum]


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## ahvalj

Penyafort said:


> Rather than a replacement, I rather guess there was a long period of coexistence of several forms (forms in -eno like seteno were very used), with a relatinizing wave trying to make things more coherent. In most of the languages, Latin ordinals from one to ten were quite used. If anything, French is the exception.
> 
> But I concur that Spanish is particularly difficult when it comes to ordinals nowadays. I don't agree, though, that your ordinary guy was convinced to use them. That is why most people only use them from 1 to 10. French and English use ordinals to call the centuries (le dix-huitième siècle, the twentieth century), Spanish doesn't (el siglo doce, el siglo veinte).


But are latinate forms more transparent? Since there are ocho and diez, what was wrong in ochavo and diezmo? The restored forms don't seem to me to solve any morphological or word-formational complexity. 

By the way, I couldn't find what was the inherited form of 7th: sietmo?


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## fdb

YYYYY said:


> Premier looks inherited to me,



you are probably right. I will edit it.



YYYYY said:


> second with its g looks Occitan.



The spelling (with -c-) looks Latin, but the pronunciation with /g/ was perhaps influenced by Occitain.


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## Penyafort

YYYYY said:


> But are latinate forms more transparent? Since there are ocho and diez, what was wrong in ochavo and diezmo? The restored forms don't seem to me to solve any morphological or word-formational complexity.



They wouldn't be the only learned words that become common.

The reasons could be many. Often they are simply preferred in order to avoid confusion and then become the norm. Ochavo and diezmo are also fractionary and use to indicate an eighth or tenth part. A diezmo, for instance, was a historically important tax, a tithe in English.

As I said, though, words like cuarto, quinto and sexto were very common from the beginning too, at least for many authors.



YYYYY said:


> By the way, I couldn't find what was the inherited form of 7th: sietmo?



Siedmo. Which is a weird word, as -dm- is a rare combination, and could explain why séptimo (often pronounced "sétimo") would eventually catch on. (Although I still wonder why not the common seteno)


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## Sardokan1.0

Sardinian numerals are quite particular, the first three are regular Latin, while the following use a composite construction.

_*1st *- Primu
*2nd *- Segundu
*3rd *- Terzu
*4th *- Su 'e bàttor (that of four)
*5th *- Su 'e chimbe (that of five)
*6th *- Su 'e ses (that of six)
*7th *- Su 'e sette (that of seven)
*8th *- Su 'e otto (that of eight)
*9th *- Su 'e noe (that of nine)
*10th *- Su 'e deghe (that of ten)_

etc.etc.


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## Olaszinhok

Sardokan1.0 said:


> _*4th *- Su 'e bàttor (that of four)
> *5th *- Su 'e chimbe (that of five)
> *6th *- Su 'e ses (that of six)
> *7th *- Su 'e sette (that of seven)
> *8th *- Su 'e otto (that of eight)
> *9th *- Su 'e noe (that of nine)
> *10th *- Su 'e deghe (that of ten)_


 Those numerals are really peculiar, can you please use them in a sentence as an example?


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## Sardokan1.0

Olaszinhok said:


> Those numerals are really peculiar, can you please use them in a sentence as an example?



something like this :

_*Italian *: Mio figlio è il *quarto *a sinistra della fila.
*Sardinian *: Fizu meu est *su 'e bàttor* a manca de sa fila.

*Italian *: Oggi è il *sesto *giorno del mese di Settembre.
*Sardinian *: Hoe est *sa 'e ses* dies de su mese 'e Cabidanni/Cabudanni (oggi è quella di sei giornate del mese di Settembre).
_
P.S.
Sardinian can use the determinative article as synonymous of "that", in the same way of Spanish.


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## Olaszinhok

Sardokan1.0 said:


> *Italian *: Mio figlio è il *quarto *a sinistra della fila.
> *Sardinian *: Fizu meu est *su 'e bàttor* a manca de sa fila.



Thank you.


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## Cenzontle

Prof. Davies's Corpus del Español 
finds "setmo", "sietmo", and "siedmo"—but very few instances of them—in the 13th century, and none after that.
In the 13th through 15th centuries, "seteno" and "septimo" are roughly equally robust
(there are also small numbers of "se*p*teno" and "s*et*imo").
Of course these are forms known to the literate producers of manuscripts.
The numbers for the 16th through 18th centuries are too small to draw statistical conclusions, but "seteno" continues to appear.  
The 19th century yields just one "seteno" (compared with more than 100 "séptimo").
"Seteno" tends not appear in modern dictionaries.


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## Ben Jamin

Penyafort said:


> Siedmo. Which is a weird word, as -dm- is a rare combination, and could explain why séptimo (often pronounced "sétimo") would eventually catch on. (Although I still wonder why not the common seteno)


Accidentally "siedmo" sounds uncanny like Polish "siódmy" or Russian "siedmoy" and slovak "siedmy". Can we call it "reconvergence"?


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## ahvalj

Cenzontle said:


> Prof. Davies's Corpus del Español
> finds "setmo", "sietmo", and "siedmo"—but very few instances of them—in the 13th century, and none after that.
> In the 13th through 15th centuries, "seteno" and "septimo" are roughly equally robust
> (there are also small numbers of "se*p*teno" and "s*et*imo").
> Of course these are forms known to the literate producers of manuscripts.
> The numbers for the 16th through 18th centuries are too small to draw statistical conclusions, but "seteno" continues to appear.
> The 19th century yields just one "seteno" (compared with more than 100 "séptimo").
> "Seteno" tends not appear in modern dictionaries.


Thank you. This, together with the above posts, shows that a number of parallel forms existed in the language, which certainly facilitated the accommodation of the Latin loans for this kind of words. Yet it would be interesting to know if there is something shedding light on how and why it all began. Numerals are a special part of the vocabulary, after all.



Penyafort said:


> words like cuarto, quinto and sexto were very common from the beginning too, at least for many authors


Actually, they look inherited: for quinto only k is suspicious (would have expected **cinto, but Romance languages tend to retain k here, unlike in the cardinal numeral), and in sexto the x is just orthographic.



Ben Jamin said:


> Accidentally "siedmo" sounds uncanny like Polish "siódmy" or Russian "siedmoy" and slovak "siedmy". Can we call it "reconvergence"?


Yes, though purely casual: normally 'convergence' implies adaptation to similar challenges.


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## Cenzontle

> -dm- is a rare combination


Aside from learned words like "administrar" (already present in 13th-century texts), 
proper names like "Cadmo", and  verb+pronoun constructions like "dezidme", 
Old Spanish had "sedmana" (alongside "semana", 'week') and "bidma" (mod. "bizma", 'poultice').


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## Ben Jamin

YYYYY said:


> Thank you. This, together with the above posts, shows that a number of parallel forms existed in the language, which certainly facilitated the accommodation of the Latin loans for this kind of words. Yet it would be interesting to know if there is something shedding light on how and why it all began. Numerals are a special part of the vocabulary, after all.
> 
> 
> Actually, they look inherited: for quinto only k is suspicious (would have expected **cinto, but Romance languages tend to retain k here, unlike in the cardinal numeral), and in sexto the x is just orthographic.
> 
> 
> Yes, though purely casual: normally 'convergence' implies adaptation to similar challenges.


Not necessarily. It can be also a pure coincidence, at least in phonetics.


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## slideman

French has a second, Latinate, set: primo, secondo, tertio etc, used AFAIK mainly to number paragraphs in formal document (or otherwise humorously, where it also includes the form “deuxio”!).  This two-set situation sounds very similar to the Spanish situation you mention (which I didn’t know about).  The native set would have wider *currency*, but the Latinate set would have greater *prestige*; these respective attributes may have been enough to keep both sets running in parallel for some time.  It isn’t surprising that each language would eventually settle on a single set for most purposes, but we can only speculate on the reasons for which one they chose.


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## MiguelitOOO

oƈt+o = *ocho*
oƈt+o+ber = *ochubre *(*ochubre *→ octubre)
oƈt+oſ = octos... (octosílabo —"octo" not followed by any other letter does not exist in Old Spanish—)
oƈt+a+e = octae... (octaedro)
oƈt+a+g = octag.. (octágono)
oƈt+á+v = octav... (octavo/octava)

The words "_ochavo_" and "_ochava_" had probably come from the Old Spanish word "_ocha_" that means "oƈtáva" (maybe an abbreviation).
The words "octagenario" y "octocoral" seems to be modern ones.


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