Re: first try at conlanging

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

> En réponse à Joe Hill <joe@...>:
> To make a long story short, French marks plural (and gender) by way of
> articles, nouns and adjectives only sometimes reflect also the number.
> It's the main reason why a French noun can never be used without an article
> (except proper nouns, though some dialects of French go as far as using the
> articles with proper nouns).
>
> Christophe.

Thanks Christophe, for a very interesting description of french orthography.

I hadn't quite realised that, as you say, the method of marking plurals
& gender was responsible for needing an article with every noun. I
immediately came up with a counterexample - 'il est facteur' etc., but
really this only serves to emphasize your point since he couldn't be
more than one postman. Very nice!

BTW, how do you deal with an adj. that is sometimes used like a noun, like
(I think) 'idiot' - 'il est idiot' ou 'il est un idiot' ?

Stephen Mulraney.

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