Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

Garth Wallace wrote:

> Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
>> Staving Joe:
>>
>>> 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!
>
>
Of course, the main difficulty comes when translating the phrase 'two
heads are better than one'.

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