Re: No plural morpheme

On Nov 24, 2007, at 2:12 PM, Chris Peters wrote:

>> From: caeruleancentaur> > What are your experiences with this in
>> either a natlang or your> conlang? I believe that Japanese does
>> this.>
>
> You're right -- Japanese has only one plural morpheme:  -tachi,
> which is used only in reference to people (nouns or pronouns).
> Apart from that, the only way they can do plurals, apart from them
> being understood in context, is by specifying a number.  (The
> number, furthermore, may include a counter suffix, which describes
> the shape or class of the object being counted.)
As someone else said, there are several plural morphemes -- and they
have different distributions. My favorite thing about -tachi is that,
when attached to a name, e.g. Taroo-tachi, it means "Taroo and others
(e.g. his family, friends, etc.)".

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