Ordinals only after numerals?

1

Glyphs app generates automatically the ordn feature as follows:

sub [zero one two three four five six seven eight nine] [A a]’ by ordfeminine;
sub [zero one two three four five six seven eight nine] [O o]’ by ordmasculine;

I know that the ordinal characters are used in the Spanish and other romance languages for proper gender ordinal numbers, similar to the English abbreviations 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. However, is it not also used for example for Mª or Nº?

Does anyone know the reason why Glyphs put the numerals in front? Maybe to make it possible to apply it to an entire text block (and Mª or Nº will be typed using the keyboard anyway)?

2

The first thing I don’t know. Is it an ordinal?

To quote the specs:

The ordn table maps various lowercase letters to corresponding ordinal forms in a chained context (GSUB lookup type 6), and the sequence No to the numero character (GSUB lookup type 4).

My emphasis. You are right about numero though.