Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

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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