#paucal

Gretchen: More than one book. More than one cake. It just makes everything better. But there are also other ways of making plurals – not just by adding an S or a /s/, /z/ sound if you have /dagz/. In English, sometimes you make the plural by – for example, if I have the word “foot” and I have the word “feet,” Lauren, what’s the difference between these?

Lauren: Hmm. I’m just gonna observe that there is no S there. The second word definitely means more than one foot.

Gretchen: It does because English also forms the plural by changing the vowels sometimes, particularly for words that go back to Old English and have this – what’s called the “Germanic Ablaut Pattern” – but of changing the vowels to indicate a different sort of grammatical thing. The fact that some plurals in English form by changing their vowels was actually really helpful to me back when I was studying Arabic in undergrad because in Arabic, sometimes you add an ending to make something plural. But in a lot of cases what you actually do instead is you change all of the vowels, and sometimes even the associations of how many vowels there are or which consonants come together. For example, if you have the Arabic word /kita:b/, which means “book,” there’s also the word /kutub/, which means “books.” So, in this case you’ve changed the /i/-/a:/ vowel pattern – that’s a short /i/ and a long /a:/ – to just two short /u/’s – /kutub/. /kita:b/. /kutub/.

Lauren: Hmm. It’s a little bit like English “foot” and “feet.”

Gretchen: A little bit except that it’s changing two vowels for the price of one. In this case, it’s a bit more complex as a whole system. This is definitely an oversimplification to say that it works the same way as “foot/feet,” but the fact that the vowels change is something that’s kind of neat. One thing that I found particularly interesting about this system is that it can also apply to words that get borrowed into Arabic. Arabic has the word /fals/, which means “money,” and the plural of it is /fulu:s/. You take this F-L-S set of consonants and, instead of just having the single A there, you have /u/ and then a long /u:/, okay?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: That’s fine. Then, Arabic borrowed the word “bank” from English, which is pronounced /bɑnk/.

Lauren: As in a money bank?

Gretchen: Like a money bank, not a riverbank. The plural of /bɑnk/, because it looks kind of like /fals/ – it’s got a consonant and then an A and then two more consonants – so the plural of “bank” in Arabic is /bunu:k/, like /fulu:s/. You put /u/ and then long /u:/ in between the three consonants.

Lauren: How clever.

Gretchen: I always enjoy it so much when languages take a word from another language and then adapt it to the morphology of their language and say, “Okay, we figured out how to plural it. We know how to pluralise words like this. We’re gonna do this the way that our language does it.”

Lauren: In fact, Nepali borrowed the word /kitab/ from Arabic and, instead of using the Arabic form of the plural – in Nepali you have “one /kitab/” but you have “two /kitabhæɾu/.” They also have a suffix at the end of the word, like English does, but they don’t use the Arabic form of the word. If you’re listening to people speak Nepali every day, you can often hear “two /kitab/” and it’s just as grammatical as “two /kitabhæɾu/.”

Gretchen: So, it’s not like in English where the S is obligatory if something is plural. You can just put the /hæɾu/ if you want it or if it’s necessary, but you can also omit it?

Lauren: Yes. Whereas, Hindi, which also borrowed /kita:b/, Hindu has obligatory plurals. So, “one /kita:b/” and “two /kita:bɛ̃/” – closely related languages, you can’t trust them to always have the same obligatoriness or not.

Gretchen: What’s interesting, Arabic was very influential in a lot of different areas because another language that borrowed the word for “book” from Arabic was Kinyarwanda, which is spoken in Rwanda. It slightly adapted the form of the word. Instead of being /kitab/, it borrowed as “igitabo” because Kinyarwanda really likes words to begin and end with vowels. In Kinyarwanda, there’s also a prefix “igi-” which means that something is singular and belongs to a particular class. If you wanna make something that begins with “igi-” plural, you change “igi-” to “ibi-”. So, “igitabo” is “book” and “ibitabo, with the B, is “books” because you always change “igi-” to “ibi-” to make something plural. They just took the same pattern that they had in their language and said, “Yeah, we can do this with this word from this other language.”

Lauren: What an exciting life the word /kita:b/ has had.

Gretchen: It feels very poetic that the word for “book” travelled around a lot. It was a technology the way that a lot of languages have borrowed the English word for computer. A lot of languages borrowed the Arabic word for “book” because they were some early people to have books.

Lauren: So far, we’ve had you can put a suffix on the end of a word. Kinyarwanda has some prefixing at the start of the word, so where the morphology is. Arabic and sometimes English involve some internal changes. You’re not necessarily just adding or removing something from the start or the end. These are some of the strategies for pluralising, but they’re not the only ones.

Gretchen: What else can we do?

Lauren: One thing that I find very satisfying as a plural strategy is where you repeat the word and the repetition is what makes it indicate that it’s a plural.

Gretchen: That’s very economical. It makes a lot of sense. It’s like saying, “book” and “book book” to mean “several books.”

Lauren: Yeah. Indonesian is one of the widely spoken languages that does this. The word for student is /muɾid/ but the word for “students” – plural – is /muɾidmuɾid/ as one option for how to pluralise it.

Gretchen: Huh. Very nice.

Lauren: There’s something very visual about that form of plural that I find very satisfying.

Gretchen: Speaking of languages that form their plural with a prefix, there’s actually an analysis of French. Traditionally speaking, if you learn French in school, you learn French forms a plural by changing the ending the same way that English does. But in actual fact in French, often those S’s at the end are silent pretty much always.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So, there’s another analysis of French whereby it’s actually that the plural is a prefix. This especially shows up in French words that begin with vowels. Children who are learning French before they learn to read and write, they often assume that many words in French that begin with a vowel actually have plural prefixes. If you take, for example, the word “ami,” which means “friend,” in French and the plural of it is also “amis” but with an S at the end, but you can’t hear the S.

Lauren: No, I could not hear that.

Gretchen: It is completely silent. There is nothing to hear. Most of the time when you say a word in French, you put another word in front of it. Especially for a noun, you’re often gonna put an article like “the” or “my” or something in front of it. You would say, “l’ami” – “the friend” – “les amis” – “the friends.” That’s “les,” which is the plural form of “the,” but it has this S that’s silent. Because that silent S is before words that begin with a vowel, you pronounce that S like a /z/.

Lauren: Huh. Yeah.

Gretchen: The same thing with “my friend.” You have “mon ami,” “mes amis.” Again, that A makes the S in “mes,” which is also the plural form of “my,” be pronounced as if it’s actually there.

Lauren: I can totally see how, as a child...

Gretchen: You can see where this is going, right, because you don’t actually speak French and you’re like, “Uh-oh! It really sounds like the singular is ‘ami’ and the plural is...”

Lauren: “Zami.”

Gretchen: Exactly. “Zami.” You get little kids – it’s really cute when they’re learning to write. It’ll be like “Me zami” and they’ll write, like, Z-A- M-I for “friends.”

Lauren: Okay. That is too cute.

Gretchen: I have friends who post this is what their young children are doing on Facebook, like little notes that they’re writing for class, they’re talking about “le zami.” It’s so cute.

Lauren: Kids are just great little paradigm analysers, aren’t they?

Gretchen: Well, this is the way that language change could happen because you could imagine if French wasn’t a written language or if, you know, some sort of catastrophe happened and French people just weren’t writing anymore – you had an area of French where they had stopped writing for a while and they started writing again – you could imagine that people would’ve reanalysed it at this point. This is actually what’s marking plural in the spoken version of French even though the writing is preserving this other thing. If you were to start writing it differently in the modern era – not looking at what it did historically – then it would be very sensible to say that the plural is actually “zami.”

Lauren: I think it’s also worth mentioning that there are plenty of languages that get by just fine without any plural morphology adding onto words at all.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. But I think all languages have some way of expressing whether there’re different amounts of stuff. The question is just do you do this as an intrinsic part of particular words, or do you do this with extra words. You could say in English, “One book. Two book. Many book. A few book.” These words would convey, also, that there’s more than one book as well.

Lauren: This is what a lot of Austronesian and Pacific Island languages do. They get by, obviously, completely fine. For example, Tetun, which is the language of Timor, if they need to mark something as plural, they’ll just use a separate word which is “sira” or “they.” So, again, they’re using the determiners a bit like French children use when they can’t hear the difference between the plural and the single form.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, spoken French just completely uses the determiners to indicate what’s plural. It’s just in the writing.

Lauren: We’ve talked about determiners and how they have a lot of work to do for tiny words. This is just another thing they get to do. Overachieving.

Gretchen: Sometimes, your “the” word can take on that function instead. Or you can use overt number words. Or you can do things like, you know, for English words like “rice” or “bread” you end up using things like “loaves of bread” or “grains of rice,” “cups of rice,” “glasses of water" because saying “rices” or “waters” or “breads” is a different thing and refers to kinds of rices and breads rather than specific bread items.

Lauren: We’ve talked about different strategies different languages use to make plurals. When we look at this across a lot of languages and see what languages do, what we’re doing is typology, Gretchen. I don’t know if you knew that’s what you were doing right now.

Gretchen: We are doing typology, yes. There is a very cool website if you’re interested in linguistic typology which is the World Atlas of Language Structures or WALS. They have all these interesting maps pulling information from all these different grammars of all these different languages and putting it on a map so you can see how many languages have prefixes for their plurals versus suffixes for their plurals versus something else.

Lauren: Because plurals are one of those things that every grammar describes, if a language has plurals, even if it doesn’t, it’s such a common feature across the world’s language, it’s often relatively easy to describe. It means that WALS has – it’s one of the biggest parts of the survey. It has over a thousand languages, which means that one in seven of the world’s languages are included in the survey, which is pretty impressive.

Gretchen: It is pretty good. Not all languages even have grammars written of them or have been converted into WALS, but that’s a pretty high ratio for WALS.

Lauren: What do you think is the most common strategy in the survey of making plurals?

Gretchen: Well, as a very Anglocentric person, I’m gonna say suffixes?

Lauren: You are correct. I don’t know how distributed the survey is. It could just be if you look at the map and where the plural suffixes are, it is really obviously an Indo-European/Europe kind of area phenomenon.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, it’s not quite clear if that’s just Indo-European languages are more likely to be in WALS in the first place, which is definitely true. If we actually just had grammars for the thousand languages of Papua New Guinea, probably this ratio would shift.

Lauren: But plural suffixes are very common. The next two most common are plural words – so not using any kind of morphology – and plural prefixes – so putting something on the start of the word rather than the end. Of course, that’s not the only options that you have.

Gretchen: What are some of these other options?

Lauren: We talked about reduplication already. You can have a change in the tone of a word. There are some African languages that have systems where the tone or the pitch of the word changes depending on whether it’s plural or not, which is obviously very different to something like Mandarin tone, which more people are familiar with, where the tone can change whether it means a particular thing at all. This is used grammatically.

Gretchen: That’s really interesting. I didn’t know people used tone for that. Another one of my favourite less-common types of plurals is when you just have a completely different word that means “the plural thing.”

Lauren: Ah, yeah. That is super great.

Gretchen: It’s a huge pain if you’re trying to learn the language because you’re like, “Okay, great. So, instead of memorising this one list of nouns and then saying, ‘I add this thing to them. Now, they’re plural.’” You’re like, “Now, I have to memorise two lists of nouns and all of their associations with each other.” It’s a bit of a pain. But once you know it, it’s very satisfying to be like, “Oh, yeah. Actually these are what were once historically completely different words and now just one of them is the plural of the other.”

Lauren: It would be a very interesting language to have this feature, Gretchen.

Gretchen: I don’t know if there are any languages that do this for all of their plurals, but I think there’re quite a few languages that do this in a few edge cases. One of them is English. English singular is “person” and the plural is “people.” Those are historically completely different words.

Lauren: This thing happens across languages so often and across different parts of grammar that linguists call it “suppletion” because one form just completely takes over and suppletes the part of the paradigm where the other one would be.

Gretchen: It’s the same thing that happens in things like the English verb “to be,” which is “be, am, is, are, was.” Why do some of them have B's in them and some of them have W's and some of them have neither? It’s because they were once three different verbs.

Lauren: Just crashing into each other.

Gretchen: Yeah. But that’s verbs. We’re not in verbs right now. We’re in nouns.

Lauren: I think “people” and “person” is a really good reminder as well that even though English would just fall into the WALS category of a language that has plural suffixes with the S suffix, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t occasionally use these other things like “foot/feet,” which is just a modification internal to the word, or “person” and “people,” which is the suppletion, or “sheep” and “sheep” where there’s no change at all.

Gretchen: There are some words like that in English: sheep/sheep, moose/moose.

Lauren: Emoji/emoji.

Gretchen: “Emoji” is a really interesting one because some people say, “emoji/emoji,” and some people say, “emoji/emojis,” which kind of brings us to the English side of do you adapt the plural for the way that you do it internally in a language? In which case, it would be “emojis.” Or do you make it more similar to what the source language does? In which case, it would be “emoji” because Japanese does not have the English plural strategy of just add an S to it. One of the strategies that it does have, among others, is just keep the word the same. I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs.

Lauren: The octopus.

Gretchen: The octopus.

Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis.

Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet." So, Greek does not make these plural by adding i to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural.

Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”? (/akta’ˈpodiz/)

Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /ak’taˈpodiz/.

Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.

Gretchen: I know, right? Which just sounds like, I dunno, like “Sophocles” and “Euripides” and like another Greek playwright because, I guess, they are all Greek, to be fair. But “octopodes” really, really sounds like he should be writing some plays.

Lauren: I’m looking forward to your Greek tragedy about octopuses... About those octopus-things.

Gretchen: Sea creatures of all kinds.

Lauren: We’ve been starting to explore the different options that you have for plurals across languages, which is part of why linguists do typological surveys to see other potential things that languages can do. But I find this kind of typology work is not just useful and interesting as a linguist doing linguistic analysis, it’s also a really handy way to think about language if you’re learning a language.

Gretchen: When you’re learning a new language, it’s interesting to be more aware of sort of the space, or what are some things that some languages do, so that things are less of a surprise to you if a language that you’re learning does something slightly differently. One of my favourite things in languages doing things differently is also that some languages don’t have this singular/plural distinction. They make other kinds of distinctions in how many of something there is.

Lauren: Yeah. So, so far, we’ve been looking a lot at the form and where it goes or how it changes the word and if it’s compulsory or not. But there is just more than single and plural. Between one and many, we have some languages that create specific forms as well. We have some languages that mark there’re two of something, which is known as the “dual,” as in the “duo”-type dual rather than the fighting-type duel or, depending on your accent, the glittering one.

Gretchen: I mean, duels are also done with two people, I guess. You fight a duel between two people.

Lauren: Yep. Fair call.

Gretchen: The dual tense is fascinating to me because Old English had a dual.

Lauren: Really? We squandered it?

Gretchen: Yeah, we squandered it. Except, there are still a few words that are relics of the Old English dual that we use all the time in modern English.

Lauren: Really? Is this gonna be one of those, like, now-my-eyes-are-open-I-can’t-un-see-this moments?

Gretchen: Yeah. They’re not even obscure.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Lauren, what’s the different between “both” and “all”?

Lauren: “Both” and “all”? “Both” means “two” and “all” means “everything”?

Gretchen: Yeah! So, if I say, “Both of us went to buy some books” versus “All of us went to buy some books,” “all” means “three or more.” You can’t use it for “two.” “All of us,” you and me, Lauren, “went to buy some books.”

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: No.

Lauren: Ahh…

Gretchen: Another one is “either” versus “any.”

Lauren: Hmm... “either” is a choice between two.

Gretchen: “Either of you can come.”

Lauren: And “any” is a choice between more than two. I can’t force a definition of “any” that includes only two.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. “Any of you two can come.” You just can’t say that.

Lauren: No. Ah, wow! I have this tiny space in my brain that works as a dual and I never even thought about it.

Gretchen: The third one is gonna be really obvious. You also have “neither” versus “none.”

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: So, if “either” does it, “neither” also does it. Some people insist on a plural/dual distinction between “between” and “among.” Whereas, other people don’t have this distinction.

Lauren: That’s what that distinction that they’re trying to get at is.

Gretchen: Yeah. But English doesn’t really have a dual anymore, so do we still need it in these particular words? There is still one in “former” versus “first” and “latter” versus “last.” “I read this book and that book, and the former was really good, but the latter wasn’t very good.” You can’t do that with a list of three.

Lauren: Hmm, yeah.

Gretchen: Again, those are more obscure. “Both” and “all” and “either” and “any” just really blew my mind.

Lauren: Yeah. Because my intuitions are so strong there.

Gretchen: Right! Imagine if we did this everywhere in the grammar. We used to have pronouns – more of the pronouns used to have singular and dual and plural forms in English. “I” and “we two” and “we all.”

Lauren: We sneakily haven’t talked about pronouns at all because, obviously, pronouns don’t just whack an S on the end of things the way that most normal nouns do. English doesn’t even have a grammaticalized distinction anymore between plural and singular in second person – “you” and “you” – which is why people innovate things like “yous” or “ya’ll.” Formal English doesn’t have a distinction.

Gretchen: Yeah, formal English doesn’t. “You guys,” “you folks” – yeah. The pronoun system is different, and we did a whole episode with pronouns earlier. But, yeah, English used to have a dual, like, everywhere.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: In fact, Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of English and most of the other languages spoken in Europe – with the exception of a few, and some of the languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent – it had a dual. There are a few other Indo-European languages that still have it or still have relics of it. One of them was Latin, which had some fossilised forms like “ambo,” which means “both.” If you’re “ambidextrous,” you have both hands are the right hand. Also, had relic forms in Old Irish, Homeric Greek, Old Indo-Iranian, and Old Church Slavonic. There are still a few dual forms in Slovene and Sorbian.

Lauren: If dual forms encode “two,” you’ll never guess what they call it in languages where it encodes “three.”

Gretchen: Some languages have a trial.

Lauren: These include Austronesian languages and Austronesian-influenced creole languages including Bislama and Tok Pisin.

Gretchen: That’s great. They also have a dual, right? You have a singular, a dual, a trial, and then a plural after that?

Lauren: In the pronoun systems, yes.

Gretchen: Just in the pronouns, okay.

Lauren: Pronouns – obviously because they’re counting people. People tend to make a lot more distinctions and keep them in pronouns.

Gretchen: I should say there are other languages besides Indo-European that do have duals. Inuktitut and Yupik have dual forms. Greenlandic doesn’t even though it’s related but it used to. In an entirely different part of the world, Khoekhoegowab and other Khoi languages have duals in some forms. There are duals around the world.

Lauren: There are some trials, but that is the most. No one has ever come across, in natural languages, something like a quadrial, which would be marking for...

Gretchen: Quadrial, quintial, sextial, septial...

Lauren: This is why typology is interesting. When you find there are lots of languages with single and plural. There are some languages with dual. There are even fewer with trial. And we’ve not got languages that mark a specific number of anything more. We do have languages that mark something that means “a few,” so something that’s more than two but less than lots.

Gretchen: I really like this because English kind of does this in our measure words. You can say, “one” of something or a “single” amount of something. You can say a “couple” or a “pair,” which is two – sometimes, occasionally extended to mean more than two. Like “I’ll be there in a couple minutes.” If you’re there in three minutes, meh, I think that’s still in the thing. People will really argue about this one. Then we have things like “a few” or a “handful” or “a bit.” Then we have things like “many” and “several” and “a lot,” which approximate the system as well. Some languages do this in the grammar.

Lauren: Yeah. Some do it in the form of grammar from all over the world. It’s definitely not one of those it crops up a lot in this language family or that language family. It shows up in Hopi in North America, Walpiri in Australia, languages of the Oceanic area, apparently in Arabic for some nouns, and it’s so common that it actually has its own term, which is “paucal.” P-A-U-C-A-L. It’s a very satisfying word to say, “paucal.”

Gretchen: I really like the word “paucal.” You can look at number by a strict sort of counting. You can look at number by “a few” and “a lot” and “many.” Are there any other ways of looking at how many of something there are?

Lauren: I may not have been completely upfront with you when I gave you the Nepali example about books.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: I can point at three books and say /kitabhæɾu/, but I could also point at three books, a couple of notebooks, and some pens and say /kitabhæɾu/, and it would still be technically correct.

Gretchen: So, /kitabhæɾu/ doesn’t just mean “books” – because I can’t use “books” to mean the plural of “pens” also.

Lauren: “Books and associated materials.”

Gretchen: Ah, like “books and stuff.”

Lauren: Yeah. The Nepali plural is not only optional, as I said at the start, but it also has a slightly broader meaning in a lot of contexts. I could say, “Gretchen-/hæɾu/” and it would be like “Gretchen and her family and associated peoples.”

Gretchen: Is this like when you say, “Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year” or something like that?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: “You and yours” is like “you and your family” or kinfolks or people that are associated with you?

Lauren: Yeah. Whatever that semantic meaning you have, that’s kind of what /hæɾu/ is doing in these sentences.

Gretchen: Huh, that’s really interesting.

Lauren: It’s a very elegant way of representing. We know you kind of mean “this generally related content.” One of the really nice things about plurality is that it’s often something that is very easy to see in how it’s marked and how it’s used, so you can use things like Google Translate to play around. You can look at examples in things like children’s books. And you can begin to analyse plurals a bit like a linguist does as you’re learning them and going about understanding a new language. Having a little bit of terminology around what the typological possibilities are with plurals can make it a bit easier to approach them in a new language.

Gretchen: I watched a demonstration of a monolingual fieldwork scenario where you have no language in common with someone – and this was set up as a demo because the people did have a language in common but they set it up as a demo for the audience – and they pretended they had no language in common and tried to figure out some things about the language from the volunteer. It was really interesting because it’s fairly easy to ask somebody, you know, here’s a stick. Here’s two sticks. Here’s three sticks. You can kind of point at them, and people can generally figure out what you’re asking, and they can answer that. It’s one of the easiest areas of a grammar to start approaching, rather than getting into more complicated stuff about hypothetical scenarios and this kind of thing. It’s an easy thing to learn at the beginning when you’re starting out learning a language.

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