Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

Irina Rempt-Drijfhout wrote:
>
> On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Charles wrote:
>
> > (my favorite example, English "the" falsely implies "only one")
>
> I started on an agglutinative language once that had five kinds of
> "article" markers. From broad to narrow:
>
> indefinite plural   "women", "some women"
> definite plural     "the women", "those women"
> indefinite singular "a woman" "one woman or another", "any woman"
> definite singular   "the woman", "that woman", "the woman we've been
>                     talking about"
> unique singular     "She" (title of the High Priestess of the very
>                     small country where the language was spoken)
That might be a useful thread, about quantifiers "some" "all" "none"
"sole" "dual" "several" "many" "most" "few"  "certain" "this" ...
along with gender/class register/politeness or other dimensions.
I recall asking as a kid, "How many is a few? some? several?"

> I remember that there was one word roughly meaning "Verimak!" that
> consisted only of affixes: a tense marker, an aspect marker and two
> negations (or one circumfixed negation). No root whatsoever, because
> that should have been the copula and the language was zero-copula.
I heard that one can build a logic with just one (NOR?) operator.
Perhaps once there was nothing, then there wasn't.