Sesame
How do you ask a question whose answer is "I'm the second child in my family"? When we want to know the same information about presidents, I found out we can ask "what's president x's presidential order number?" But I cannot find how to ask the same question about other things. In my language we have a pronoun, chandomin, that we use for asking these kind of questions, but it seems English doesn't have such a pronoun. So how do you ask these kind of questions? Is it natural to ask for example,"what's your birth order number?", or "what's the order number of the book you chose?, imagine you were supposed to chose a book between like 20 books.". Or maybe you use different types of questions depending on different situations. Like asking "which book did you choose?" and "how many older siblings do you have?" Thank you in advance for your care and answers.
Nov 30, 2016 10:25 PM
Answers · 6
3
The best I can come up with is: "What number child are you in your family?" I don't like this kind of construction but I can't think of anything better.
November 30, 2016
1
For the birth order number question specifically, I would probably ask "Are you the oldest?" or "Are you an oldest child?" or "Are you the baby of the family? If someone said something about their siblings, I may ask "Are they older or younger?" I would expect the person to tell me their birth order after being asked that type of question. But generally, there isn't a direct way of asking that type of the question. Perhaps "Which number _____ is/was that/he/it?"
December 1, 2016
1
It's a puzzle. I don't have a good answer. My first idea is something like Su.Ki.'s, "Where are you in your family, with regard to birth order?" My second idea, which I think is a good practical solution, is to ask "Do you have brothers or sisters?" or "Are you the oldest in your family?" The person you ask will probably reply with a full description: "Yes, I have two older brothers and one younger sister." If not, you can ask a follow-up question.
December 1, 2016
1
Another possible (but rather awkward) way of saying this is 'Where do you come in your family?' usually followed by tentative question such as 'Er..are you the eldest, or...?' The pronoun that we're missing, of course, is something like 'What-th'. If this existed, we could ask questions such as 'It's the what-th of November today?' or 'Reagan was the what-th president?'. Unfortunately, no such pronoun has been invented, so there really isn't a satisfactory way of asking these questions.
November 30, 2016
1
You could start by asking how many siblings they have (people usually answer how many older/younger siblings they have)... Or just take the super simple way out and ask "what number child are you?" :p
November 30, 2016
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