Numerals Re: Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting
From: | Markus Miekk-oja <fam.miekk-oja@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, June 24, 2003, 9:42 |
>I meant anade_w_ism literally - some natlang is supposed to have a ten
times
>worse version of whatever weirdity I can think up. Something like you
>described for Maggel, perhaps, or a language there numbers ending in 1 4 7
or
>9, plus those divisible by 21, require the noun to be in the dual, the rest
>singular, except zero, which requires feminine nouns to be in the plural
and
>masculine ones in a nullar number only used for this.*
I've been thinking of having some numerals to be pronounouns (zero, one,
two), some to be nouns (a group of four of) governing genitive (or
something), some being adjectives and therefore governing whatever case that
be natural (ie, depending on actual role in sentence), and some ("10 without
x" (in my conlang, actually "12 without x, 0 < x < 4) using an otherwise
defunct abessive ("a without case") form. (So, you say in effect "a group of
twelve (soon to be mentioned kind of) items lacking three")
>You can say things like _två öl_ "two beer" in Swedish too, BTW. Sweden's
>supposed not to have pub culture. With measurement units we cheat, since
they
>typically have zero plurals! This even happens to innocent normal nouns
when
<they get press-ganged into unit service. Eg, _man_ "man" normally
pluralizes
as _män_, but has zero plural when used as unit of army strength or labor
force.
Also, öl change gender when discussing "unit of beer" or "kind of beer", as
do some other words too.
_man_ also pluralizes as _mannar_ in some contexts, tho' I can't think of
any. (A vocative form when the unit of army strenght is being adressed?)
Reply