Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

Amanda Babcock wrote:
> But when I got to that section, the example language was -
> guess what - English.  Of course.  We have verb structures like "will
> have done".  I should have known...
Isn't that pretty common, at least in European languages?

> I guess there's nothing for it but to pursue my ideas for languages
> spoken by aliens with a different psychology :)  So, anybody have any
> ideas what kind of social organization would lead to a language that
> doesn't distinguish between singular and dual, but does distinguish
> between singular/dual and plural?
Could be phonetic changes.  In the Uatakassi pronominal clitics, many of
them have the same form for singular and dual, and a separate one for
plural, due to certain sound changes.  However, the plural was
frequently used for two in those cases, so post-Classical Uatakassi just
had a simple singular/plural distinction.

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