Re: The Birds and the Bees of Gender

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> Everybody knows with the number that there are several objects...
And you can even have two or three redundancies, "Those 3 cats were
eating their dinner"; plural marked by "those" (instead of "this"), "3",
"-s", "were" (not "was"), and "their" (not "his" or "her"), and in a
language with agreement, you can have further redundancies "Esos tres
gatos gordos y feos comi'an la cena de ellos" (Those three fat and ugly
cats were eating their dinner).

However, I think that English MAY lose that.  In my dialect, the plural
-s is dropped on a few nouns with numbers, such as "fitty cent" /fIri
sInt/ for "fifty cents".  Granted, one never refers to "cents" without
SOME kind of number, either an actual numeral or a word like "a few", so
perhaps it's just a word like "sheep" with the same form in the singular
and the plural.  I can see that generalizing to all nouns.  Some langs
do that, Turkish, for instance, drops the plural suffix with numbers.  I
suspec the reason that English marks number, even with numerals, is that
they once were fused with case, so that one would choose -e instead of
-um (singular dative vs. plural dative).  There WAS no plural suffix to
drop, so you couldn't use the singular form.  However, in modern
English, -s has become just a plural suffix, instead of an
accusative/nominative plural suffix, thus it's logical to drop it when
number is already marked.

--
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was hanged." - Irish proverb
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