Re: Adopting a plural

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:05:45 -0400, Pascal A. Kramm <pkramm@...> wrote:

>On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 01:34:43 EDT, John Leland <Lelandconlang@...> wrote:
>
>>In a message dated 10/4/04 7:45:12 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
>>jeffrey@HENNING.COM writes:
>>
>><<  It means 2+ and that's emphatic (of some importance in the discourse) >>
>>That is roughly my understanding of the Japanese plural, though those more
>>fluent in Japanese are entitled to correct me. (I had 2 years of Japanese
>but it
>>is very rusty now.)
>>John Leland
>
>Japanese does NOT have a plural form at all. Japanese nouns are neither
>singular nor plural, strictly speaking. To count things, a number and a
>"counting word" is used, according to what sort of items are counted.
That's not true. For pronouns Japanese has a special plural ending -tachi,
watashi "I" > watashitachi "we", anata "thou" > anatatachi "ye" (to use the
original English usages). Occasionally you'll see reduplication for emphasis
and plurals, like the rare ware(?) "I" > wareware "we".

Buenas tardes,

Ben