numerals
Numerals are adjectives that can head a counting clause & are not necessarily subject to grammatical
agreement.
As a grammatical category, Numerals is not merely a semantic grouping of number terms, but is more generally a
grouping of terms indicating quantity or degree that have similar syntactic behaviors.
At first glance, semantic numbers can function syntactically like adjectives; in that sense, it could be said
that they belong to the Adjective grammatical category.
However, as a grammatical category, Numerals are defined by their ability to instantiate
the so-called counting structure (هيكل العدّ). Although all these terms are classified only as Numerals
for simplicity, it should be kept in mind that they are always viably Adjectives as well.
Although this structure is referred to as defining of Numerals, elative adjectives — like semantic numerals
— may be used both as attributive adjectives & as the head term of the counting structure as well.
Since they share all the features of semantic numerals, elative adjectives are likewise classified as
Numerals — keeping in mind that all Numerals are always viably Adjectives as well.
In one sense, elative adjectives are a type of ordinal number; while the canonical ordinal
numbers refer to an endpoint in a numerical sequence (e.g. "the fifth"), elative adjectives have
their endpoint in a
qualitative maximum (e.g. "the smartest").
Although the number of non-compound numbers is
finite, the grammatical category of Numerals is considered an open category insofar as it contains the elative
forms of all Adjectives.
Numbers
Cardinal Numbers may be grouped in the following sets:
- 1 – 10
- 11 – 19
- multiples of 10 (i.e. 20, 30 ... 90)
- صفر ("zero"), ميّة ("hundred"), ألف ("thousand") & مليون
("million")
Alongside all terms ending in ة (-e), the sets of 3-10 & 11-19 are the only terms in
Palestinian Arabic with construct forms. Meanwhile,
واحد (wāħad) & ثنين (tnēn) are the only two numbers with gendered forms rather than construct
forms.
All other cardinal numbers are built from these sets & are thus not indexed independently.
Ordinal Numbers are limited only to the first ten positions, with an additional term for the final
position; there is no productive way to form higher ordinals.
Adjectives
Although the elative forms of all Adjectives fall within this category, they are not
individually recorded as distinct lemmas unless they are not related to any positive form — with the
exception of the analytic elativizer أكتر (ʔaktar).
أكتر
most
إشي بتحبّ تسوّيه
something you like to do
the thing you like to do the most
