Re: QUESTION: types of plurals, few/many

Quoting Andy Canivet <cathode_ray00@...>:

> >From: "Karapcik, Mike" <KarapcM@...>
> >
> >         One thing that I am planning on is having three numbers for nouns
> >and verb tenses: single, small plural, and large plural.
>
> I don't know if it's likely to occur in a natural language or not - but I
> toyed with the idea of a collective plural for my conlang, Komahren.  I
> haven't decided whether to include it or not - but basically there would be
> a singular form, a plural form (multiple objects), and a collective
> inflection for referring to groups of related objects - eg. "the police,"
> "women," "people who wear red socks on tuesdays," etc...
So, presumably, you could have one word for "policeman", of which
the singular would signify the same as English "policeman", the
plural "policemen", and the collective "the police".

The normal plural suffix in Georgian, -eb-, was originally a collective
derivational suffix.  This explains why, after quantifiers, only the
singular is used.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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