Re: Quantifiers and negation with unusual grammatical number

>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,"
>If I want to say, "People have always wondered if the moon is made out of
>green cheese," do I use the plural or the multal?
I think the examples you gave are in the absolutive aspect, meaning they
make a generalization or absolute statement about all the things of a given
category. This is really distinct from the issue of noun number; often the
absolutive case is indicated by something other than noun number. I mention
this because, in English at least, it's easy to overlook because the
absolutative aspect is mostly implicit.

What your description puts in my mind is negated numbers, so you could say
"I have not-a-lot of flutes" to mean you have none or a few, and "I have
not-just-one flute" to say that you have some or many. Of course, one would
have to wonder about the perspicuity of saying "not-a-few".