"this is getting to me".

Ok, does anyone else think we "all" are wierd? I have been caught more times than not, doing some freaky thing with my mouth to try to figure out the placement of a tongue on the palate saying "th, th'a, th'e, th'i, th'ee" trying to figure some phonetic puzzle out. Or people will catch me saying "hum... 'it's Yeh big', 'it's yeh little', it's yeh blue' when trying to figure out how a certian word is used.

and i'm totally involved with my stange games... while the rest of teh world, i'm sure, is wondering if a white jacket sans sleves is approperiate for me. ;-)

anyhow, i'm eager to hear what you come up with for "pence".


not speaking "english", can i ask if "tup" (tuppance') is a functional word in isolation? or is this the only place we see it.

also, russian has a dual plural but it represents trial quantities as well as the mythical quadral variety.

hebrew makes use of the notion of "things that come in pairs" too. the regular plural suffix (-im or -ot, depending on gender) is used for cases involving two or more of an object that doesn't normally come in pairs. thus, two mirrors = "shtey mar'-ot"; two houses = "shney bat-im". six mirrors = "shesh mar'-ot"; etc.

the dual suffix "-ayim" is used for two or more of something that usually comes in pairs. thus, two eyes = "shtey eyn-ayim"; a hundred eyes = "me'a eyn-ayim".

so what it is is not actually dual vs. plural marking, but two different forms of the plural, depending on whether or not the object being pluralized normally occurs in pairs or not.

then there are the exceptions, like the fact that the plural of "teeth" id marked with the "dual" form. no idea what's going on there.

Oh, boy. And I had (and still) have difficulties with the Serbian plurals in all the cases and with those weird suffixes for the nouns with specific genders for different groupings, etc. A friend of mine is Slovenian but his father is Serb and he says Slovenian is worse for that. I don't think I'll even try!

U said: "Halkomelem Salish is pretty frightening"

salish is the best. do you know leora bar-el's work on squamish verbal plurality?

I don't - tell more! :-) The only book on Snichim (Squamish) I know is Kuiper's, which amazed me because I could "get" it pretty easily - the pump was primed with Halkomelem, I guess - once I realized that Snichim did *not* go through the Central Salish vowel shift that Halkomelem did.

I am - a bit late in life, but ADD interfered :-) - going to be going to UBC specifically for their Musqueam program, I can't wait! Salish people tend to be pretty guarded with their language, so I'm really looking forward to be able to study it properly.

By the way, do you know of Dr. Tom Hukari's Hul'q'umi'num' (Island Halkomelem) website? Amazing, a series of lessons including sound files, I'll find the URL if you or anyone is interested...

as a hebrew speaker who's taking intro arabic, i've noticed the following difference between the hebrew and arabic dual.

in arabic, the dual is its own morpheme, like yasir shows. in hebrew, it's not.

in hebrew, we don't get:

vered (rose, singular)
veradayim (roses, putative dual)
veradim (roses, plural)

ayin (eye, singular)
eynayim (eyes, putative dual)
eynim (eyes, putative plural)

instead we get veradim to mean two or more roses, and eynayim to mean two or more eyes. *veradayim and *eynim are not well-formed. the "dual" in hebrew is really just a plural form for things that usually comes in pairs (or sometimes things that come in two sets, like fingernails or teeth, as discussed earlier in this thread). that's why it's misleading to call this hebrew morpheme "dual". it would be better to call it something like "the dual plural" as opposed to "the plural plural".

the two exceptions that i can think of are the words for "hundred" and "thousand". we get the following:

me'a (100)
matayim (200)
me'ot (hundreds)

elef (1000)
alpayim (2000)
alafim (thousands)

i have no idea about aramaic or other semitic languages.

here's something that seems interesting in arabic, which has singular, dual, plural. (yasir, confirm if this is correct.)

you can say:
andi ax wahid (i have one brother + singular)
andi thalatha ixwa (i have three brother + plural)

but not:

*andi ithnain ixwa (i have two brother + dual)

the dual morpheme can't co-occur with the number two. there's a good possible explanation: that it's redundant; but that should rule out "ax wahid" too, since "ax" on its own means "one brother", making "wahid" redundant.

in hebrew, by the way, there's no problem in using the "dual plural" with the word for "two":

shtei eynayim (two eye + dual plural)

because it's really a plural, not a dual.

I am dubious that it is that simple. few if any languages have redundant rules or functions.

do the various ways of creating plurals, create different moods or suggest different emphasis to teh listener?