Re: Quantifiers and negation with unusual grammatical number

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:45:35 +0100, taliesin the storyteller
<taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:

>*shake hands* meet my Taruven, also with four, or five, depending on
>who's counting: singular, dual, paucal (3 to 5) and plural, and maybe
>`nullar' in addition. The paucal is used for things that come in a set
>amount, like the 11 football player-PAUCAL[*], or the dozen egg-PAUCAL
>(and then you strictly don't need the number)
I like it! I think I might want to borrow that idea for Tirelat. Plural is
a strange thing in Tirelat as it is -- only a few nouns have any form of
plural at all, and some have more than one. It's more similar to a
derivational operation like "diminutive", where the form of the affix and
the meaning of the derived word can vary from one word to the next. So it'd
be nice to have something like

ftuni -ling                 shim-ling
season-SET.PL         or    eye -SET.PL
"the (four) seasons"        "(two) eyes" (unless you're a spider,
                                          in which case you have eight)

as a plural form for things that come in sets of fixed quantity.