How is this question framed? (rather slickly)

I mean, "without changing much of the word order" above.

Travis, would you then care to guess which language it is?

How about, "Which child of his are you?" or "What's your birth order?" or "Where do you come in in the family mix?"

Deborah, I really don't have enough information in this case to make a sufficient stab at it, besides the overall word order, and some potential agglutination.

I think Nia's "What's your birth order" works. Even though it seems that "birth order" should refer to all the siblings, that term (or "order of birth") does seem to be used to refer to only one child, in lots of psychology-related hits I got in a google search.

I told one of my co-workers about the question posed by Glotal, and he said that Esperanto has a word that could be translated as "howmanyeth". But unless Glotal's parents always spoke Esperanto, I don't think it can count as a native language.

Hungarian , being a fairly synthetic language, also has a word, "hányadik", that could be translated exactly as "howmanyeth" (maybe this is Glotal's language, too?). I can't think of any Indo-European language I am familiar with where you could put this question like this (except perhaps some Slavic ones, but even there it would sound somewhat differently). I would render the sentence in question into English as "How many children/kids did your mother/parents have before you?". The only verb I can think of that you could use with "father" is "beget", but first, it is old-fashioned, and second, som may consider it immodest. I also like the renderings of Joanne and Travis. I'm afraid we can't make it shorter than 9 words in English. :)

Sorry, make it "some".

In Afrikaans we have the word hoeveelste which can be translate as howmanyeth - how many = hoeveel

Andre,

How, then, would you ask the question in Afrikaans?

hoeveelste kind is jy?

In German: wie vielste?

I don't think that you can really say "wie vielste" in German, as "wie" and "viel" are two seperate words in German, even though you will see the two written together as simply "wieviel", and "vielste" would mean something like "many-th", which alone does not really make much sense. Well, at least "vielste" doesn't show up in the Webwörterbuch which I'm using, that is, http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/

Well, "Hoeveelste kind is ju" is certainly succinct. I think we need "howmanyeth" in English. My co-worker's suggestion for how to ask the question in English was to ask "Are you the oldest" and hope the person is forthcoming.

Deborah
and the answer to that can simply be "no" :)