Re: Plural prefix?
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, February 5, 2004, 19:51 |
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On Thursday, February 5, 2004, at 02:12 AM, Trebor Jung wrote:
> Merhaba!
>
> I've got ANOTHER question... Are there any languages that pluralize (e.g.
> ) nouns with prefixes?
Most certainly - _all_ the Bantulangs, which occupy quite a large area of
sub-Saharan Africa right down to the Cape. But these langs also
singularize nouns with prefixes :)
Examples from Swahili:
SING. PLURAL
mtu watu (person ~ persons)
kitabu vitabu (book ~ books)
jicho macho (eye ~ eyes)
(Swahili, like the other Bantulangs, has several different classes of
nouns, each with its
own singular & plural prefix; the singular prefix is sometimes zero, e.g.
jibu ~ majibu "answer(s)")
Examples from Xhosa:
SING. PLURAL
umntu abantu (person ~ persons)
isikolo izikolo (school ~ schools)
izinyo amazinyo (tooth ~ teeth)
Of course, as Shreyas rightly observes, spoken French does just this, with
the additional funnction
of definiteness ~ indefiniteness, cf. the word for "school":
SING. PLURAL
DEFINITE: /lekOl/ /lezekOl/
INDEFINITE: /ynekOl/ /dezekOl/
I'm certain there are many other examples among the world's languages.
Ray
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