Pluralis på svensk och tys k (was: Re: Performative verbs (was: Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at)

Quoting Mark Reed <markjreed@...>:

> To apply the test to Swedish, let's say you were discussing baseball
> in that language (not very likely, perhaps) and you wished to express
> the number of RBIs(*) a certain player has accumulated this year.
> Without expanding or translating "RBI", how would you make it plural?
I'd ask myself what gender it is. If common, _RBIer_, if neuter _RBIn_.

If I knew what "RBI" meant, I'd probably have a gut feeling for what gender it
should be. Anyway, this would point at -er as the morphologically regular pl
ending for commons.

Back to my point re: frequencies: statistical regularity is alot more
interesting if it's 100:1 rather than 51:50. Saying that neuters ending in
consonants regularly form zero plurals is helpful, despite that you can find
counterexamples - saying that commons ending in consonants regularly form
plurals in -er isn't particularly.

                                                   Andreas

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