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Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

From:Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 15:54
Staving Amanda Babcock:



>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? :) Or, perhaps, agrees with odd vs. >even numbers? :) >
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. Pete

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Joe <joe@...>