Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

--- Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> a
scris:

> 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...).
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.

> 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).


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