Bryatesle: Universal Quantification (and the Scope of Negation)

Universal quantification in Bryatesle has some peculiarities with regards to scope, at least when compared to most European languages. "Universal quantifier" is basically fancy for 'all' (or 'each' or 'every', although some differences exist between them; turns out 'each' and 'every' are more similar to each other than to 'all', but no more on that for now). Consider what happens with negation:

not all men are tall

I do not have all the volumes of that work

If we want to make a statement where we actually deny having each and every one of them, English requires using a different pronoun altogether -

I do not have any volumes of that work / I have no volumes of that work

no men are tall

In Bryatesle, it is possible to convey both of these meanings by use of negation and 'all'. These are distinguished by the use of the negative congruence case marker. The word 'all' is bar in the least marked form. It is inflected as follows in the plural (the use of bar in the singular is somewhat different, and is not dealt with it in this post) :

pl:
nom: bares (bara with feminines)
acc: barku (bares with neuters)
dat: barsa (barse with masculines)
abl: barti (bara with neuters)

With negation and no negative congruence marker on the head noun, it is parsed as the first examples in English:

da bares keng-er sdruf mii
not all       men-pl   tall    stand-3sg.animate
but not all men are tall

This is parsed as a statement that does not rule out the existence of tall men, but it does assert the existence of at least some who are not tall.

However,

da bares keng-ute sdruf mii
not  all      men-pl.neg tall stand-3sg
but no man is tall, but all men are untall

It is common for negated plural 3^rd person subjects to have a singular verb form. Also, as might not have been stated very clearly in posts about Bryatesle this far, it lacks a verb that directly corresponds to 'to be', but rather uses other intransitive verbs that often convey some extra information, such as the form of the quality expressed (i.e. tallness is upwards, so one stands tall, etc.)

Not all dialects use the partitive as the negative congruence marker - in fact, some have a suffix -tav instead. Dialects that entirely lack a negative congruence marker exist, and they have dealt with this in different ways, i.e. generally having some other case marker on the noun or even on 'bares' to distinguish how the negation affects the quantifier.