Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

----- Original Message -----

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!
Hooray indeed.  Now leaving aside the human corporeal for a moment, Peter,
would you apply your system to the animal and plant world?  Leaves tend to
divide up into threes and fives if they are monocots; for the insect world
where legs are six;  for arachnids, crabs and their relatives and octopi
eight (I take it this is a coastal culture!); and for a great number of
natural things--forests, grass, stars, swarms of flies, stones, flocks of
birds, grains of sand, dust moats, etc.--infinitude?  I'm new again, to the
list, so if you've already discussed this, forgive me.  It seems that you
could have a gender for singulars, duals, triples, quintuples, octuples, and
infinites, making it very evil indeed. :)

Sally Caves
(back again after a long absence)
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/whatsteo.html
Al eskkoat ol ai sendran

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