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Re: Even *MORE* Scandinavia...

chris cunningham
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SubjectRe: Even *MORE* Scandinavian linguistics; was: Republicanism still an offence in England?
Fromchris cunningham
Date2002-05-21 02:45 (2002-05-21 02:45)
Message-ID<bNgG8.1170$Jm.280876@typhoon.neo.rr.com>
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Newsgroupsalt.fan.tolkien
FollowsPradera
FollowupsPradera (5h & 55m)
"Pradera" <pradera@pradera.prv.pl>wrote in message news:acb885$a9a$1@pingwin.acn.pl...

Pradera
U?ytkownik Troels Forchhammer <Troels@ThisIsFake.dk>w wiadomooci do grup dyskusyjnych napisa?:3CE913F7.8DDDBB4A@ThisIsFake.dk...

Troels Forchhammer
Hey - count us Danes in there as well ;-) When you talk about our number system there is only a few illogicalities

Pradera
we

Troels Forchhammer
don't employ ;-)

I believe that I've heard that there is an East-european language which have the normal singular and plural, but in addition a third form in

Pradera
between

Troels Forchhammer
for a few - the actual use of which depends on the word - it would for instance demand fewer houses to go from a few to many than it would beers ;-)

Pradera
Most of the slavonic languages have or had once a 'double' number, in addition to singular and plural, meaning there's two of something. But I don't think that's what you mean...

arabic also uses dual, in addition to singular and plural.

YaKTaBa : he writes YaKTaBAN : he and he write YaKTaBU : they (masculine) write

KiTAB : book KiTaBAN : 2 books KuTuB : books

but then, they only use plurals for 3 to 9 (or is it 10?) items after that, they use singular :) and the plural for non-human entities, like books, is actually the feminine singular, for no reason whatsoever.

but then, the most aggravating thing about arabic is that they don't print most of their vowels, just the "long" ones, so that KTB could be KuTuB (books) or KaTaBa (he wrote), requiring careful attention to context, and lots of redundancy.

but for those situations where they want to include the short vowels, they have diacritical marks, which, along with some of their consonant markers, are *very* similar to tolkien's elven diacriticals (and thus i bring this back on topic <g>).

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Pradera (5h & 55m)