Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

In French, we have the case of "un pantalon"
(singular) for "trousers". But I also sometimes heard
(although seldom) "il porte des pantalons", meaning,
just one pair of trousers, so there seems to be an
hesitation: singular or dual ? In fact, there is no
real dual in French, but in this case, the speaker
kind of feels the necessity for it. We also say "une
paire de lunettes", "une paire de ciseaux" (glasses,
scissors): again, good old dual is pointing up its
nose. Let's force the government to give us back dual
!

--- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
> 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.

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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