Plurals in non-english languages

singular/dual/plural is indeed common, english even has a few random leftover examples floating around

penny/pence/pennies

corpus/corpora/corpuses

although these are merely accidental and can be accorded to difference in country of origin.

english does not have dual trial or paucal plurals because its noun classes are anchored soundly in natural gender and rely heavily on the direct association of pronoun to noun. the word 'woman' is entirely female , but 'table' would never be described as 'she'. Languages like german and russian differentiate between gender and animation among singular nouns, but lack such specificity in the plural. varied plural forms are necessitated by this gender shift between number categories. as adjectives and verbs are inflected to match number and speaker the noun must also have the same forms of declension so they can be related accordingly. also, english doesnt have free word order, so the chances of words being next to ones that dont immediately correlate is slim thereby eliminating the need for multiple types of plurals.

Some indigenous languages make a distinction between "collective" and "distributive" plural - "they [distr.] are working" would mean "they are (each) working (individually)" and "they [coll.] are working" would mean "they are (all) working (together)."

The Polynesian languages distinguish singular/dual/plural and also encode "inclusive vs. exclusive" in their pronouns for "we," depending on if the addressee ("you") is or is not included. Hawai'ian has [accented letters indicate vowel length, should be a macron but that's not e-mail friendly] "káua" "we dual inclusive," i.e. "you (singular) and I," "máua" "we dual exclusive," i.e. "he/she and I but not you," "kákou" "we plural inclusive," i.e. "you and I and possibly he/she/they, three or more persons in total," and "mákou" "we plural exclusive," i.e. "I/we and possibly he/she/they but not you, three or more persons in total."

For whatever that's worth. :-)

G.

Irish Gaelic has a dual plural, but only when counting people. The word 'beirt', meaning 'two people', has no connection in modern irish to either the word 'duine' (person) or 'dha' (two). Two houses, however, is just 'dha tithe'.

Can't it be both fun and difficult? Pardon the duality :D

Seven cases and three genders: includes Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Czech, Slovak as well. I just love how new languages are formed by political unrest! Does Sanskrit have a vocative? In Serbian and archaic Bulgarian, the female name "Jana" occurs in many songs as "Jano" because the singer is calling her. It often misleads folks into thinking the subject is a male.

Hm. Well, THAT went completely off-topic!

and on a side note, in slovenian and slovakian the dual plural is used only for things that happen to be multiple, and not for things that come in pairs. for that the plural is used.