Monday, August 7, 2017

questions - Asking the position of a person in a sequence


How to ask the position(?) of a president (like 10th) of a country, correctly?



Answer



Probably this is the first question on this particular issue here on ELL, but it's been asked many times before on ELU. That link is to the one kept open while duplicates are closed (about once a month!).


As the answers there will show, there isn't any "natural" way to succinctly phrase such a question in English. Informally, people sometimes ask things like



"Obama is the how-many'th president of the US?"
"This question is the what'th on the subject?".




but they're not at all standard. The best I can think of that remains strictly "grammatical" is...



"What is the ordinality of Obama among US presidents?"



...but I don't recommend learners bothering with that either, since not all native speakers would even understand you. Although it's not really "correct", most people would probably just ask something like...



"What number president is Obama?"



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