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Number in Trentish

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Thursday, December 13, 2001, 15:05
I noticed this kind of English sentence:

    There are mice in the house.
    There are mice in the corner.

And, just for the sake of evil, felt like disambiguating them.

"What's to disambiguate?" you say!  Well, when we talk about 'mice in the
house', we don't place them anywhere, so long as they're in there: there could
be mice in my sock drawer, grandma's chest in the attic, and at the computer
desk.  But with 'mice in the corner', we place them together.  (The only reason
for this is because the meaning of 'corner' makes it necessary--and the example
easier.)

Suppose we differentiate these plurals.

    There are mice-A in the house.
    There are mice-B in the corner.

Then we could say something like:

    There are Easter eggs-A in the kitchen.
    There are Easter eggs-B in the kitchen.

..where the first form implies that they've been scattered about and hidden,
while the second says they are all in one place (say, on the kitchen table,
ready to be painted/hidden/whatever).

Trentish does this.

There are six forms for number:

    (zero)        nomic ("Mice" are eating my rice)
    (zero)/s'V-   singular ("a mouse" is eating it)
    me-           paucal aggregate ("a few mice" are in the corner)
    el-           paucal disperse  ("a few mice" are in the house)
    ?lume-        plural aggregate ("many mice" are in the corner)
    ?lel-         plural disperse  ("many mice" are in the house)

so:

   Trentish     Roughly English
    tKiki-       "mice in general"
    stKiki-      "a mouse"
    metKiki-     "a small group of mice"
    eng'tKiki-   "a few mice"
    ?lumetKiki-  "a lot of mice"
    ?leng'tKiki- "many mice"


        *Muke!

Replies

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Irina Rempt <irina@...>
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>