Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

Trebor Jung wrote:
> "Possibly not. "One paper" is largely unambiguous, but what about "one
> "sand", or worse "one water"?
Another possibility is to let it be used as mass or count.  For example,
obConlang, in Classical Uatakassi, the term _pitaklu_ can be translated
either "sand" or "grain of sand", depending on context.

In Old Uatakassi, there was a word for "grain of sand", but it survived
into CU only as a rarely-used prefix laa- "unit of", as in _pilaataklu_,
which would mean specifically "grain of sand" or _ualaanipa_ "drop of
water" (uanipa = water).  However, in both those cases, the base form
could be used for those meanings.  In fact, laa- mostly was used to mean
simply "part of", e.g., _uakitani_ = political entity (e.g., state,
empire, kingdom, republic, etc., any independant political entity),
_ualaakitani_ = province (county, district, etc), _uanistukka_ = family,
_ualaanistukka_ = branch of a family.

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