Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Onwards with #141: Other Ways of Combining Inverse Number with Regular Number

I previously posted about combining inverse number and regular numbers

One could imaginably have nouns keep marking number in a regular way, and have articles that appear if the unexpected number is being marked, so, e.g.

man
e men

e cow
cows
 If the language is like English with regards to nominal morphological irregularities, we could also have cases along the lines of
e sheep
sheep
and cases like
moose
e moose
I have noticed there's someone using google translate to read this blog in Spanish recently. That's not a big problem, but Google translate marks the latter nouns in the "e sheep-sheep", "moose-e moose" tuplets with a plural marker, and this makes the point invisible in google-translated Spanish.
Thus, in general, the nouns' number marking would be somewhat redundant, i.e. both the inverse and the regular marking appears. However,  for some nouns, only the inverse marker is of any relevance with regards to number, and for those both ways occur. In the given examples, sheep are expected to appear in flocks, and thus the plural is more common. Moose are more likely to appear one by one (with the exception of the cow and her calves for a part of the year ­ – but these groups too appear as individual groups, so you maybe a separate word for these groups?)

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