Re: Fluency Wish-List

>> (but then, does a rabbit have TWO legs?  Or four?  What do we
>> do about animals, Doug?????)
>
>Skerre handles the animal legs with the dual plural.  This means that if a
>pirate has kili (a leg), and a Skerre has kuli (two legs), then a rabbit has
>kukuli--the plural of the dual, which means that the rabbits has more than
>one set of legs.  The plural in Skerre is a reduplicative prefix--the dual
>covers a small set of words and is formed through an ablaut process (I think
>that's the word).
Interesting solution.  Tokana doesn't have duals, since it doesn't have
plural marking on nouns, but there are several words which refer to pairs
of body parts:

inna    "eye"
inie    "pair of eyes"

mol     "hand"
molie   "pair of hands"

Words like "inie" and "molie" take a singular determiner when referring
to a single person's pair of parts, and a plural determiner when referring
to more than one pair, so Sally's "raise your hand(s)" example can be
disambiguated four ways:

tiyisò  mol
raise.Imp-the.Sg  hand
"raise your hand"
[talking to one person]

tiyisots  mol
raise.Imp-the.Pl  hand
"raise your hands"
[each person raise one hand]

tiyisò  molie
raise.Imp-the.Sg  pair.of.hands
"raise your hands"
[talking to one person]

tiyisots  molie
raise.Imp-the.Pl  pair.of.hands
"raise your hands"
[everybody raise both hands]

I've never thought about what to do with animals.  I think what I'll
do is adapt the words for human limbs to four-legged animals:  So
"nalhie" means "pair of arms" when used of a person, and "pair
of forelegs" when used of an animal, while "kalie" means "pair of
legs" when used of a person, and "pair of hind legs" when used of
an animal.

The proverb "Eyes for the owl, legs for the rabbit" uses the
word "kalie" for "legs".  I suppose this is reasonable, since
it's a rabbit's hind legs which make the difference.

Matt.