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.
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.