Re: irregularities

In a message dated 12/16/01 1:57:40 AM, joe@WANTAGE.COM writes:

<< I need to get some irregularities and idioms in there


The best I've got:


The noun sky is always in the dual number.

"To look in the water" means to be vain. >>

    Harkening back to Arabic, body parts that naturally come in pairs take
the feminine *singular*: Eyes, ears, legs, arms, breasts (probably why it
takes the feminite), and body parts that come in singles take masculine
singular (again, this can be guessed).  A weird thing is that mass nature
nouns also take the feminine singular, so that in one of those Qur'aan soora
there's a line "And the trees and the stars bow down", and since both "trees"
and "stars" take feminine singular, the verb is in the dual, with ends in
/-aan/, which keeps with the rhyme scheme of the whole thing.  I thought that
was pretty neat.
    So, if "sky" already takes the dual, why not have all natural nouns take
the dual?  That'd be interesting.
    Also, there's the happy maxim: "Sound change is regular and produces
irregularity; analogy is irregular and produces regularity."  That could help
you out.  :)

-David

"Zi hiwejnat zodZaraDatsi pat Zi mirejsat dZaCajani sUlo."
"The future's uncertain and the end is always near."
                --Jim Morrison

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