Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

Peter Bleackley wrote:

> Staving Joe:
>
>> Peter Bleackley wrote:
>>
>>> I have an idea for a language, provisionally entitled "the Coastal
>>> Language", whose (human) speakers have a deeply-entrenched cultural idea
>>> that everything has a natural quantity. Its nouns belong to genders
>>> determined by the natural quantity, and each gender has its own number
>>> system. The corporeal gender contains items such as body parts whose
>>> natural number is considered to be two, so the singular form has been
>>> absorbed into the dual.
>>
>> What about Noses, Torsos, Heads, and the like?
>
> That's an interesting question. I haven't entirely decided. One possibility
> is that they would belong to a different gender, for things that usually
> occur singly. Another is that they would be assimilated to the corporeal
> gender by analogy with other body parts. A third is that gender assignment
> of such body parts would be irregular. This possibility gains bonus points
> for being the most evil ;-)
Or it could be based on semantics: things that normally occur in pairs
(like hands) would be assumed to be dual while things that normally
occur singly (like heads) would be assumed to be singular, as long as
the context didn't demand the other interpretation. Hooray for ambiguity!

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