Ŋʒädär: 'The More the Merrier' and the like

Ŋʒädär has a construction that can express the notion of 'the X, the Y:er'. The quality or quantity  or even noun labelled X in the English construction above would be in the comitative-genitive; either the copula or a verb of perception is required, and another quality or quantity in the instrumental. These two adjectives or quantifiers need to be placed just before the verb.

The verb can have subjects and objects, and the adjectives may in fact take inverse markers in these cases - markers that go before the case marker - which 'agree' with the role of the nouns with regards to the main verb. So, e.g. 'hunter prey good-com.gen.-direct more-instr.-inverse catch-direct' - 'the better the hunter the more prey he catches'

jalt'ar k'ıvər maba-z-hus dov-jut-rok söly-z
hunter prey-plur good-direct-com.gen many-instr catch-direct

Although the notion 'the more the merrier' might not have been uttered, it would come out as

dovhos malırık ıh
many-com.gen joy-instr is

Detail #42: N pieces each

The previous post involving 'each' inspired me to think a bit about the construction used in the topic, the construction used to express giving members of some group a certain amount each.

I came up with a few ideas:

• Use an adverb formed by clustering together a bunch of pronouns: to me-you-him-them (alternatively, with dative or whatever). Simple and has a certain attractiveness to it. There's a kind of obvious way it would have come about and been generalized for each instance of 'N# each'.
• Use a special form on the numbers. Four-distr. pound = four pounds each.
• The previous option could be made interesting - what if the -distr. form then is generalized to other things? Bread-distr. = bread for everyone! Fast-distr. = everyone speed up? Everyone is?|can be?| should be?|may be?  fast.
• And, again, what if it went the other way? In some way, this could be seen as a very special kind of imperative, so an imperative affix on the numeral. The grammaticalization path would go from the very specific context of '(here, take) four' until every context is covered by it, included telling that each person got so and so many or are entitled so and so many somewhere.
• Some kind of fossilized imperative verbs along the lines of 'take an allotment of  N' or 'allot N'. Maybe not even fossilized - they could still be distinguished between when you're the recipient or the distributing part.  
• In a way, a modal verb form expressing permission easily could generalize to this kind of numerals?

Detail #3: some analytical tense constructions

In some language where the normal indicative present (progressive) is the simplest tense, morphologically, the active participle is used with copula and whatever verb construction is used in place of to have, to obtain  various TAMs by various constructions. To be is used with intransitive verbs, to have with transitive ones.

subj: nom, (obj: acc),  participle.acc = inchoative
subj: comitative, (obj: acc),  participle.nom = habitual [exceptional in using to be even when an object is present]
subj: dat, obj: instr, participle.nom = indicates that the subject would like to do something. Intransitives require a dummy object, which normally is the numeral "one" or an indefinite pronoun.
subj. dat, (obj: nom or acc), is + participle(comitative) = obligation

The piece of paper on which I wrote this idea down years ago was tiny, and therefore there's a lot of really short ad hoc abbreviations in it. Hence, exactly what I meant is a bit unclear to me.

Still, I think a language with something like this would be best with, say, 4-5 different constructions along these lines, maybe one or two of which only appear with objects present. Finally, they shouldn't completely cover a certain type of thing - like each construction encoding a particular tense or a particular aspect or a particular mood; they should each express some combination of tenses, aspects and moods, and not necessarily even just one of them; and preferrably, they would be somewhat orthogonal to each other in what they express, so that they not form a neat paradigm.

Not every combination of subj.[case1], obj[case2], participle[case3] should be used, and some constructions where two of them have the same case could very well be permitted.