A counting system that reaches forward to the next ten
Bergaño's digits are the ones you learned in beginner lesson 8, in his spelling:
| 1 isa | 2 adua | 3 atlo | 4 apat | 5 lima |
| 6 anam | 7 pito | 8 ualo | 9 siam | 10 apolo |
He calls them "las raíces numerales de donde nacen todos los compuestos" — the numeral roots from which all the compounds are born. Everything else in this lesson is built from these ten.
Beginner lesson 8 told you metung is for counting things and isa for reciting. Bergaño states the rule and extends it:
isa (1) and apolo (10) are used "numerando simplemente" — simply counting.
metung (1) and apolo (10) are used "para individuar" — to individuate, to count actual things.
metung a babayi — one woman
apolong lalaki — ten men
And he points out what those examples show: numerals join the nouns they count with the ligature a or ng — the same linker as everywhere else, following the same consonant-or-vowel rule.
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| labing + digit | 11–19 |
| apolo | 10 |
| dinalan | 100 — but see below |
| libo | 1,000 |
| lacsa | 10,000 |
| cata-cata | an innumerable number |
Note labin metung for 11, not labin isa — the individuating form is used even inside a compound numeral. Bergaño flags this explicitly.
And a subtlety: dinalan serves only for a round hundred. Past that, it is dalan. So 100 is dinalan, but 200 is aduang dalan.
Cata-cata he glosses as "cuentos de cuentos de cuentos, sin determinar" — counts of counts of counts, indeterminate. Every language has a word for "more than anyone is going to count."
Here is the part with no English parallel. Bergaño calls the intermediate numbers "la mayor dificultad", and the reason is that Kapampangan counts toward the coming ten, not up from the one behind.
Prefix meca- to the
decade that follows — not the one you are in —
drop its polo, and add the digit.
21: the next decade is atlong polo (30). Drop polo, prefix meca: mecatlon metung.
29: mecatlong siam.
31: the next decade is apat a polo (40), so the count builds on apat.
So mecatlon metung is, structurally, "one toward thirty."
This is not a quirk of Kapampangan. Counting toward the next unit rather than up from the last is found in a number of languages — it is why English has "half past" but some languages say "half to."
For a reader it is a genuine trap: mecatlon metung contains the root for three and the root for one, and means 21. Read it as thirty-one and you are out by ten.
Whether this is still the everyday system is a question for a speaker. Modern Kapampangan counting borrows heavily from Spanish, and Spanish counts upward.
The ligature rule applies here too: link with n if the decade ends in a vowel, and with no ligature if it ends in a consonant.
The ordinals are the digits with the ca- of individuating from lesson 6 — one more job for that syllable.
| Ordinal | Form |
|---|---|
| first | mona or kauonan |
| second | kadua |
| third | katlo |
| fourth | kapat |
| tenth | kapolo |
| eleventh | kalabin metung |
| hundredth | karinalan |
| thousandth | kalibo |
Intermediates stack the same way as the cardinals: twenty-fifth is kamekatlong lima — the meca- construction inside an ordinal.
And they become verbs, conjugated like roots in c, meaning to put oneself in that position:
Kumadua ka. — Put yourself second.
Kumakatlo ku. — I am putting myself third.
Prefix balang to an ordinal for "every nth":
balang kalima — every fifth
balang kapolo — every tenth
Bergaño's example sentence is balang kalima batbatan ya — every fifth one gets beaten — and he glosses the tenth case with the Latin decimas quisque. His examples do tend this way.
His chapter also covers distributives ("one each, two each") and a section on counting money, with units now historical — the tinga, a weight of half a tael, among them.
Do people still count this way? Spanish numerals dominate modern everyday counting, especially for money and clock time. Whether the meca- system survives is exactly the kind of question a speaker can answer and a book cannot.
Why is "first" irregular? Because "first" is irregular in most languages — it is suppletive in English too.
Is lacsa related to Sanskrit lakh? Almost certainly, via the maritime trade routes. Number words travel.
Numerals are conservative, so Bergaño's chapter is still largely usable — and the anticipatory system is the sort of thing that silently defeats a reader of older texts, because every word in mecatlon metung looks familiar.
Next: Adverbs, Interjections and Irony.