Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

To make things just a little bit worse:

I think that there might be another dual: the case of
two complementary concepts (man / woman, day / night,
yin / yang...). There are two of them, but they are
not alike (can even be contradictory), and put
together they form a system (which is not the case for
hands: one could do with one hand only). This is not
polarity.

I wonder if any natlang has markers for that concept ?

--- Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>
> And then there are the words that come in natural
> pairs (like hands), which
> have two duals, the regular one to indicate an
> unassorted pair (like two
> right hands belonging to two different persons), and
> a dual called "natural
> dual" which indicates a natural pair (e.g. two hands
> belonging to a single
> person). To take the example of "hand" indeed (hfehl
> ['weIl], neuter), its
> regular dual is "ehfehlha" [i'weL@], and its natural
> dual is "eul" ['Uel]
> (the natural dual is always an irregular form,
> normally shorter than the
> regular dual).
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus

Replies