Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English

Peter Bleackley wrote:

> 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.

What about Noses, Torsos, Heads, and the like?

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