[19:28:05] Newsletter 157: A single singular or a plurality of plurals? -- https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2024-05-30 [19:38:22] Oh boy, oh boy... I have soooo many things to say (especially for Breton that totally breaks the simple pattern 🤪 sorry not sorry) (re @vrandecic: Newsletter 157: A single singular or a plurality of plurals? -- https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/...) [19:44:04] Please do :) (re @Nicolas: Oh boy, oh boy... I have soooo many things to say (especially for Breton that totally breaks the simple pattern 🤪 sorry not sorr...) [19:45:06] Standard Arabic has dual form, and a few words with "super-plural" form, for example the word for "year" has singular (one year), dual (two years), plural (3 or more years) and super-plural (a great many years, usually decades or centuries or more). (re @vrandecic: Newsletter 157: A single singular or a plurality of plurals? -- [19:45:06] https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/...) [19:46:13] That's exactly what we're looking for. [19:46:53] I'm aware of "'am" and "a'wam"; what are the other two? (re @Ideophagous: Standard Arabic has dual form, and a few words with "super-plural" form, for example the word for "year" has singular (one year)...) [19:50:31] sana, sanatan, sanawat, sinun (re @mahir256: I'm aware of "'am" and "a'wam"; what are the other two?) [19:51:30] for the one your mentioned it's ɛam, ɛaman, aɛwam [19:51:53] huh, I would have thought the last two were just alternatives (re @Ideophagous: sana, sanatan, sanawat, sinun) [19:53:27] I'm re-reading my grammar books right now (as so many things happens: gender, number, mutation, all at once otherwise it's not funny :P) [19:53:27] Should I put my comment on the project chat? (re @Sannita: Please do :)) [19:53:59] I guess Breton and Arabic will have similar cases ;) (re @Ideophagous: Standard Arabic has dual form, and a few words with "super-plural" form, for example the word for "year" has singular (one year)...) [19:54:07] Yes, use the project chat or anyway community pages (re @Nicolas: I'm re-reading my grammar books right now (as so many things happens: gender, number, mutation, all at once otherwise it's not f...) [19:54:16] Here it would be lost easily [19:55:02] They are sometimes used interchangeably, but "sinun" is normally used only when it's a lot of years (re @mahir256: huh, I would have thought the last two were just alternatives) [19:57:36] so it's more of a pragmatic choice, then [19:57:38] for whatever reason I'm reminded of the phenomenon, when Arabic words are borrowed into Persian, of giving them Arabic-looking plurals which never existed in Arabic [20:00:42] another example is bayt (home), baytan (two homes), buyut (3 or more homes), buyutat (a lot of homes) [20:00:42] same for rajul (man), rajulan (two men), rijal (3 or more men), rijalat (a lot of men, usually used when talking about "great men" or such) [20:01:19] Would you ever use buyutat with an actual number? [20:01:59] probably not, it's like saying "gazillion" in English [20:02:32] Interesting! [20:02:34] I rather like the Japanese approach of changing the numeral according to the shape of the items being counted 🤔 [20:05:19] do you have some examples? (re @mahir256: so it's more of a pragmatic choice, then [20:05:20] for whatever reason I'm reminded of the phenomenon, when Arabic words are borrowed into...) [20:08:28] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L742844, for example, does not have 'ahasis' as a plural form but does have 'ihsasat' (re @Ideophagous: do you have some examples?) [20:50:33] And there's also a case of Polish (perhaps other Slavic as well) where concept of paucal-plural distinction kind of exists, but it's in fact choice of a proper case from the noun's plural (nominative for 2-4 and genitive for 5+). [20:50:33] pół stołu (half of a table: sng, genitive) [20:50:35] jeden stół (a table: sng, nominative) [20:50:36] dwa stoły (two tables: pl, nominative) [20:50:38] pięć stołów (five tables: pl, genitive) [20:50:39] However these categories would be named for a function like "get form for a number", they have to be then transformed to two dimensions of grammar tables (including Wikidata lexemes) [21:33:39] I tried to explain how numbers work in Breton here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Project_chat#Numbers [21:33:39] Feel free to comment or to add cases in others languages ;)