Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>
>
> >It may be noted that some modern dialects, including literary Taxte,
> persist
> >in using the singular form of nouns with cardinals. I dread to see
> the
> >anadewism for this one ...
>
> Welsh, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic with numbers above ten, Dutch with
> measurement units and a few common words (like "bier" or "koffie". The
> Netherlands do have a pub culture ;)))) ), German I think in the same
> way
> as Dutch, IIRC some Slavic and/or Baltic languages do that too
> (Polish?),
> etc...
I meant anade_w_ism literally - some natlang is supposed to have a ten times
worse version of whatever weirdity I can think up. Something like you
described for Maggel, perhaps, or a language there numbers ending in 1 4 7 or
9, plus those divisible by 21, require the noun to be in the dual, the rest
singular, except zero, which requires feminine nouns to be in the plural and
masculine ones in a nullar number only used for this.*

You can say things like _två öl_ "two beer" in Swedish too, BTW. Sweden's
supposed not to have pub culture. With measurement units we cheat, since they
typically have zero plurals! This even happens to innocent normal nouns when
they get press-ganged into unit service. Eg, _man_ "man" normally pluralizes
as _män_, but has zero plural when used as unit of army strength or labor
force.

* Since I can think of this, there ought to be something even worse out
there! :-)

                                                             Andreas

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