Re: Do you want a French "little" or a Dutch "little"? :))

    HA, HA, HA!!!  Oh, this tickles me greatly!  This reminds me of high
school (before I knew what a linguist was), when my friends and I would eat
lunch together, and if somebody had something we wanted (particularly candy
that came in many pieces, like Skittles, M&M's), we knew that if we asked for
"some" or even "a few", we wouldn't get any, because those amounts sounded
too large, and made us look like moochers.  If we said, "Can I have one?" or
even "Can I have, like, one?", we would get one.  So we created a word: mun
[mVn].  It meant roughly, "Look, I want some candy, and I don't want just
one, but I recognize the fact that it's yours, and that you don't want to
part with a great deal of it, but do you think you can give me just a few,
maybe two or three, just so I can get a taste?"  And so we started using it,
and we'd get mun--until it, too, became too much.  Then we just bought our
candy.  ;)
    But anyway, in Kamakawi, the same strategy I use to make mass nouns into
count nouns is the strategy I use to ask for a small part of something.  Now,
though, you have me imagining other strategies...

-David