Re: Number

On Monday 06 August 2001 11:08, J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> Consider a sentence like "Everybody
> went to the village".  This is ambiguous:  It could mean that
> everybody went to the village together (a single event).  That's
> the collective construal.  Or it could mean that different groups
> of one or more people went to the village at different times
> (multiple events).  In the latter case, we say that the events of
> going to the village are distributed among the individuals in the
> set denoted by "everybody".
The way Kélen handles this is by using two different words for
everybody: manáren, which is the generic word for 'everybody' and
mannárien, which is the distributive word for 'everybody'. So, one
would say:

te manáren rá anmári;
for "Everybody went to the village." (ambiguous)

or
te mannárien rá anmári;
for "Everybody went to the village." (multiple events)

To specify a single event, one would have to add the word anníkána
'all together' as in:

te manáren anníkána rá anmári;
"Everybody all together went to the village."

-Sylvia

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

wa jamú anániTa;  (not.be thing.SG one/alone.ADJ)

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html