Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

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...

In other words, it's a pretty common pattern to have singular nouns when
explicitly counted. After all, why specify some as vague as "plural" when
you already know exactly how many of the things you're talking about? :)))

Needless to say, Maggel doesn't do that. It would be too easy ;))) . In
Maggel, the noun agrees in number with the number in front of it (singular
for one, dual for two, definite plural for the rest). But if the number is
composite, only the first (and always smallest, usually the unit) part
appears in front of the noun. So when the number is 21 for instance, the
noun agrees in the singular number (as in |a ghho a rin tueisbfiba aineh|:
21 beautiful women - women is |rin| here, i.e. in singular form -. Note
that it's pronounced [@'Co: @'r\E~ 'DeZvIv a~'deI]). Also, the noun must
always be preceeded with the article and in complement form when it has one.

And things get even stranger when we use numbers like "8000" or "million"
which are actually nouns. The counted noun is then a nominal complement
introduced by the preposition |f|: "at" with article, and must be in the
plural *indefinite* (although the plural indefinite usually means that the
actual amount is unknown).

Hehe, why should we do simple things when we can do complicated ones? ;))))

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

Replies