Re: Quantifiers and negation with unusual grammatical number

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:47:05 -0500, Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
wrote:
> What is the proper grammatical number to use when asking "Do you have any
> flutes?"  Do I use the plural as I do in English?  The problem is that
> Tovlaugadóis has three separate number categories that all correspond to
> the English plural.
You could use the singular ("have you got a flute?") -- unless you are
inquiring about a number of flutes, your need to know how many flutes are
owned stops with the first (i.e., the answer to "do you have any flutes"
is only 'no' until the first flute).

> What do I do when I want to negate existence and say "There weren't any
> skirts"?  "There weren't any skirts" (i.e. skirts didn't exist then)
> means something different than the singular "There wasn't any skirt," so
> that must indicate that I need to use one of the other three numbers.
The actual difference between those two sentences is that "there wasn't
any skirt" is definite (a particular skirt) and "there weren't any skirts"
is indefinite (doesnt matter which skirt).

If Tovlaugadóis marks definiteness these could be disambiguated as "there
was no skirt" and "there was not the skirt" (idiomatically in English,
"the skirt was not there").

If it doesnt mark definiteness... well, my Atlantic doesnt mark
definiteness, and it'd have:

      vééte   himatše
     ["ve:tE "imAtSE]
      lack.3s cloak
     'there is/are no cloak(s)'

(yeah, no word for _skirt_... yet, anyway.)

Something like |vééŋte himatšes|, with plural marking, might be used if
multiple cloaks were expected, but none found (or if multiple cloaks were
expected, and some were found missing...).

> I'm not certain that I'm up to trying to tackle the semantics of "some"
> in Tovlaugadóis; I think it could get real complicated real fast.  How
> would I say, for instance "Some men hunt with spears, others use bows"?
> What number should "men" be in?  Can I further twist the semantics by
> using
> different numbers for "men"?
Probably.  A bare "some men" should refer to all men in general (thus
multal) but probably a better rendering in most cases would be "some of
the men".... with 'men' in the appropriate number.

> I'm not sure that this is going anywhere but towards more
> confusion.  Anyone care to help me out?  Has anyone ever come up with any
> scheme of grammatical number similar to this?  Does any natlang do
> anything like this?  When I set up this number scheme in an inflected
> language, I knew that I was going to complicate things for myself by
> multiplying the number of inflections necessary, but I had no idea that
> it would do anything this strange to the semantic space.  Wheeee!
Of course, this could be your call to invent new semantemes to express
"any" "all" "none" "some" etc. in relation to this complex number system,
as opposed to ours where we simply distinguish one vs everything else and
those are easily applicable.   :x)


        *Muke!
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