Gender - and now number - in Conlang

Jim Henry wrote:

>One conlang I started, but haven't worked out in great detail (no
>texts written in it yet) has four grammatical genders corresponding
>to the "four elements" (fire, water, earth, air).
>The four noun classes are declined in three numbers, denoting lack,
>sufficiency or surfeit.
Very interesting number system!  What do you do when there's some but
not enough of something?  That's neither a lack nor a sufficiency.

Also, what do you do in cases where there the speaker has no reason
to evaluate a quantity as "enough", "not enough", or "too much"?
How would you say "There's some string on the table" when you have
no knowledge of - or interest in - what the string is for, and thus
cannot determine if there is enough string or not?

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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