Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

Andreas Johansson sikyal:

> > >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.
Russian might slake your thirst for weirdness.

When counted with "one", nouns and adjectives of all genders take the
nominative singular.

When counted with "two", "three", and "four", nouns of all genders take
the genitive singular. However, adjectives agreeing with a masculine or
neuter noun take the genitive *plural*, while adjectives agreeing with
feminine nouns take the *nominative plural*.

When counted with numbers of five or higher, nouns and adjectives of all
genders take the genitive plural.

And of course, numbers like "21" are counted as if they were "one", "22"
as if it were "two", etc. But the teens (11, 12, 13, 14) are counted with
the genitive plural.

Yivrian is so blessedly regular in this regard. The numbers are prefixes,
and nouns with prefixes higher than "one" are plural.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

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