Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

I think that with hands, it's just a question of
laterality. You might have two right - or two left -
hands ans still be able to lift a washing machine,
though maybe incomfortably, but two men - or two women
- will never (until further biological progress) make
a child, which is the reason for which there happens
to be males and females.

Yin and yang are opposite but complementary, one
cannot imagine yin without yang and reciprocally, but
you can imagine having both hands (or even half a
dozen) on the same side of your body. It's not the
same kind of complementarity. Yin is NOT(Yang), left
hand is not NOT(right hand).

--- Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...> wrote:
>
> You and Christophe are sort of saying the same
> thing. Your complementary concepts are just a
> slight extension of the natural pair idea. In
> Talarian, we have mamto (the two hands) and
> nimawiro (woman-man, married couple). Both are
> complementary concepts: the left hand fits with
> the right, but two right hands are simply a
> collection of miscellaneous body parts; woman and
> man together are also complementary. Both also
> form a "natural pair".
>
> Two right hands (of two different people) working
> as one can certainly be seen as a pair in the
> usual sense: tacsomamto.
>
> Padraic.

=====
Philippe Caquant

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

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