Lingthusiasm Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more
In English you have one book, and three books. In Arabic you have one kitaab, and three kutub. In Nepali itâs one kitab, and three kitabharu, but sometimes itâs three kitab.
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren look at the many ways that languages talk about how many of something there are, ranging from common distinctions like singular, plural, and dual, to more typologically rare forms like the trial, the paucal, and the associative plural. (And the mysterious absence of the quadral, cross-linguistically!)Â
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
Itâs also our anniversary episode! Weâre celebrating three years of Lingthusiasm by asking you to share your favourite fact youâve learnt from the podcast. Share it on social media and tag @lingthusiasm if youâd like us to reshare it for other people, or just send it directly to someone who you think needs a little more linguistics in their life.
This monthâs bonus episode was about reading fiction as a linguist! Check out our favourite recs for linguistically interesting fiction and get access to 30+ additional episodes if youâve run out of lingthusiasm to listen to, by becoming a member on Patreon.Â
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
World Atlas of Language Structures
WALS feature 33A: Coding of Nominal Plurality
WALS feature 34A: Occurrence of Nominal Plurality
Nepali plural (Wikipedia)
Arabic plural (Wikipedia)
Kinyarwanda plural (Wikipedia)
Indonesian plural (Wikipedia)
Tetum plural (Wikipedia)
Suppletion (Wikipedia)
Lingthusiasm Episode 2: Pronouns. Little words, big jobs
Lingthusiasm Episode 16: Learning parts of words - Â Morphemes and the wug test
Dual (Wikipedia)
Second personal dual pronoun (Superlinguo)
Trial & Quadral (Wikipedia)
Paucal (Wikipedia)
Monolingual field methods demonstration
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is âAncient Cityâ by The Triangles.
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Transcript Episode 38:Â Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more. Itâs been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 38 show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics! Iâm Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: And Iâm Gretchen McCulloch. Today, weâre getting enthusiastic about plurals. But first, itâs our anniversary!
Lauren: Every year in November we celebrate another year of enthusiastic linguistics podcasting. This year, we are celebrating by asking you to share your favourite fact about linguistics that youâve learnt from Lingthusiasm.
Gretchen: If thereâs a story, or a fact, or an anecdote that you find yourself re-telling people, saying, âHey, I learned it from this podcast,â tell that to people on social media. Weâve been having so much fun seeing your responses already! Keep doing it until the end of November and help us celebrate our third anniversary. We will reshare them! And you can find other peopleâs as well to share yourself.
Lauren: Most people still find podcasts from recommendations from trusted friends and acquaintances, so sharing your enthusiasm for linguistics with people is the best way for the show to find new ears. This monthâs bonus episode is all about reading fiction like a linguist. A bit like podcasts, I get a lot of my fiction reading suggestions from you, Gretchen. We talk about what itâs like to read fiction through the eyes of a linguist.
Gretchen: All of the linguistically interesting angles and facts and aspects of the fiction weâve been reading recently in this episode. We also have over 30 bonus episodes. Thatâs almost half the show! If youâve been looking for more quality linguistics content in your life, and youâve listened to all the back episodes of Lingthusiasm, there is more. We have a solution! You donât have to stop listening. You can get access to these instead.
Lauren: Just go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
Gretchen: And thanks for people who are already supporting us for helping keep the show going and ad-free!
Lauren: Not only can you read linguistics-y fiction, but you can also wear your lingthusiasm with our new merch.
Gretchen: You can wear Lingthusiasm patterns including the International Phonetic Alphabet, the esoteric symbols, and the tree diagrams on your feet with the new Lingthusiasm socks.
Lauren: I mean, you couldâve worn them on your feet with the scarf but that wouldâve been strange. The socks fit much better.
Gretchen: Wear the socks on your feet. Donât wear scarves and ties and mugs on your feet.
Lauren: We also have greeting cards with IPA âThanksâ and âCongratulationsâ on them but definitely donât wear them at all.
Gretchen: Yes. Plus, we have t-shirts, baby outfits, and various other kinds of Lingthusiasm merch. If you go to lingthusiasm.com/merch, you can check out photos of all of those and get them for yourself or for a linguist or linguistics enthusiast in your life.
[Music]
Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, itâs grammar time.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: What is the difference between these two words? You ready?
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: The first one is âbook.â And the second one is âbooks.â
Gretchen: Oh, I know this one! I know this one. Weâre good. Okay. The first one is when you just have one book and the second one, âbooks,â is when you have more than one book. How did I do?
Lauren: You did great! Congratulations.
Gretchen: Okay, good. Thank you. I am a speaker of English.
Lauren: Your English-speaker intuitions are working as expected.
Gretchen: Thatâs good to know, seeing as weâre speaking English right now. This is plurals. Sometimes, you have just one of something. You have a singular. Sometimes, you have a plural of something. In English, the kind of classic way that you form a plural is by adding an S or this /s/ sound to the end of a word.
Lauren: Weâve talked about morphology in a previous episode, which is where you add bits to a word to create more meaning. Plurals are just a really nice bit of morphology in English. Iâm very fond of them. I like being able to distinguish between whether I have one book or many books.
Gretchen: Hopefully all the books.
Lauren: Yes, ideally more than one book. I think thatâs the appeal of plurals.
Gretchen: More than one book. More than one cake. It just makes everything better. But there are also other ways of making plurals â not just by adding an S or a /s/, /z/ sound if you have /dagz/. In English, sometimes you make the plural by â for example, if I have the word âfootâ and I have the word âfeet,â Lauren, whatâs the difference between these?
Lauren: Hmm. Iâm 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 â whatâs called the âGermanic Ablaut Patternâ â 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 âbook,â thereâs also the word /kutub/, which means âbooks.â So, in this case youâve changed the /i/-/a:/ vowel pattern â thatâs a short /i/ and a long /a:/ â to just two short /u/âs â /kutub/. /kita:b/. /kutub/.
Lauren: Hmm. Itâs a little bit like English âfootâ and âfeet.â
Gretchen: A little bit except that itâs changing two vowels for the price of one. In this case, itâs a bit more complex as a whole system. This is definitely an oversimplification to say that it works the same way as âfoot/feet,â but the fact that the vowels change is something thatâs 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 âmoney,â 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: Thatâs fine. Then, Arabic borrowed the word âbankâ from English, which is pronounced /bÉnk/.
Lauren: As in a money bank?
Gretchen: Like a money bank, not a riverbank. The plural of /bÉnk/, because it looks kind of like /fals/ â itâs got a consonant and then an A and then two more consonants â so the plural of âbankâ 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, âOkay, we figured out how to plural it. We know how to pluralise words like this. Weâre gonna do this the way that our language does it.â
Lauren: In fact, Nepali borrowed the word /kitab/ from Arabic and, instead of using the Arabic form of the plural â in Nepali you have âone /kitab/â but you have âtwo /kitabhĂŠÉŸu/.â They also have a suffix at the end of the word, like English does, but they donât use the Arabic form of the word. If youâre listening to people speak Nepali every day, you can often hear âtwo /kitab/â and itâs just as grammatical as âtwo /kitabhĂŠÉŸu/.â
Gretchen: So, itâs not like in English where the S is obligatory if something is plural. You can just put the /hĂŠÉŸu/ if you want it or if itâs necessary, but you can also omit it?
Lauren: Yes. Whereas, Hindi, which also borrowed /kita:b/, Hindu has obligatory plurals. So, âone /kita:b/â and âtwo /kita:bÉÌ/â â closely related languages, you canât trust them to always have the same obligatoriness or not.
Gretchen: Whatâs interesting, Arabic was very influential in a lot of different areas because another language that borrowed the word for âbookâ from Arabic was Kinyarwanda, which is spoken in Rwanda. It slightly adapted the form of the word. Instead of being /kitab/, it borrowed as âigitaboâ because Kinyarwanda really likes words to begin and end with vowels. In Kinyarwanda, thereâs also a prefix âigi-â which means that something is singular and belongs to a particular class. If you wanna make something that begins with âigi-â plural, you change âigi-â to âibi-â. So, âigitaboâ is âbookâ and âibitabo, with the B, is âbooksâ because you always change âigi-â to âibi-â to make something plural. They just took the same pattern that they had in their language and said, âYeah, we can do this with this word from this other language.â
Lauren: What an exciting life the word /kita:b/ has had.
Gretchen: It feels very poetic that the word for âbookâ 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 âbookâ because they were some early people to have books.
Lauren: So far, weâve 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. Youâre not necessarily just adding or removing something from the start or the end. These are some of the strategies for pluralising, but theyâre 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 itâs a plural.
Gretchen: Thatâs very economical. It makes a lot of sense. Itâs like saying, âbookâ and âbook bookâ to mean âseveral books.â
Lauren: Yeah. Indonesian is one of the widely spoken languages that does this. The word for student is /muÉŸid/ but the word for âstudentsâ â plural â is /muÉŸidmuÉŸid/ as one option for how to pluralise it.
Gretchen: Huh. Very nice.
Lauren: Thereâs something very visual about that form of plural that I find very satisfying.
Gretchen: Speaking of languages that form their plural with a prefix, thereâs 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 Sâs at the end are silent pretty much always.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: So, thereâs another analysis of French whereby itâs 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 âami,â which means âfriend,â in French and the plural of it is also âamisâ but with an S at the end, but you canât 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, youâre often gonna put an article like âtheâ or âmyâ or something in front of it. You would say, âlâamiâ â âthe friendâ â âles amisâ â âthe friends.â Thatâs âles,â which is the plural form of âthe,â but it has this S thatâs 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 âmy friend.â You have âmon ami,â âmes amis.â Again, that A makes the S in âmes,â which is also the plural form of âmy,â be pronounced as if itâs actually there.
Lauren: I can totally see how, as a child...
Gretchen: You can see where this is going, right, because you donât actually speak French and youâre like, âUh-oh! It really sounds like the singular is âamiâ and the plural is...â
Lauren: âZami.â
Gretchen: Exactly. âZami.â You get little kids â itâs really cute when theyâre learning to write. Itâll be like âMe zamiâ and theyâll write, like, Z-A- M-I for âfriends.â
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 theyâre writing for class, theyâre talking about âle zami.â Itâs so cute.
Lauren: Kids are just great little paradigm analysers, arenât they?
Gretchen: Well, this is the way that language change could happen because you could imagine if French wasnât a written language or if, you know, some sort of catastrophe happened and French people just werenât writing anymore â you had an area of French where they had stopped writing for a while and they started writing again â you could imagine that people wouldâve reanalysed it at this point. This is actually whatâs 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 â not looking at what it did historically â then it would be very sensible to say that the plural is actually âzami.â
Lauren: I think itâs 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 thereâre 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, âOne book. Two book. Many book. A few book.â These words would convey, also, that thereâs 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, theyâll just use a separate word which is âsiraâ or âthey.â So, again, theyâre using the determiners a bit like French children use when they canât hear the difference between the plural and the single form.
Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, spoken French just completely uses the determiners to indicate whatâs plural. Itâs just in the writing.
Lauren: Weâve 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 âtheâ 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 âriceâ or âbreadâ you end up using things like âloaves of breadâ or âgrains of rice,â âcups of rice,â âglasses of water" because saying âricesâ or âwatersâ or âbreadsâ is a different thing and refers to kinds of rices and breads rather than specific bread items.
Lauren: Weâve 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 weâre doing is typology, Gretchen. I donât know if you knew thatâs what you were doing right now.
Gretchen: We are doing typology, yes. There is a very cool website if youâre 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 doesnât, itâs such a common feature across the worldâs language, itâs often relatively easy to describe. It means that WALS has â itâs one of the biggest parts of the survey. It has over a thousand languages, which means that one in seven of the worldâs 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 thatâs 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, Iâm gonna say suffixes?
Lauren: You are correct. I donât 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, itâs not quite clear if thatâs 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 â so not using any kind of morphology â and plural prefixes â so putting something on the start of the word rather than the end. Of course, thatâs 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 itâs 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: Thatâs really interesting. I didnât 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 âthe plural thing.â
Lauren: Ah, yeah. That is super great.
Gretchen: Itâs a huge pain if youâre trying to learn the language because youâre like, âOkay, great. So, instead of memorising this one list of nouns and then saying, âI add this thing to them. Now, theyâre plural.ââ Youâre like, âNow, I have to memorise two lists of nouns and all of their associations with each other.â Itâs a bit of a pain. But once you know it, itâs very satisfying to be like, âOh, yeah. Actually these are what were once historically completely different words and now just one of them is the plural of the other.â
Lauren: It would be a very interesting language to have this feature, Gretchen.
Gretchen: I donât know if there are any languages that do this for all of their plurals, but I think thereâre quite a few languages that do this in a few edge cases. One of them is English. English singular is âpersonâ and the plural is âpeople.â Those are historically completely different words.
Lauren: This thing happens across languages so often and across different parts of grammar that linguists call it âsuppletionâ because one form just completely takes over and suppletes the part of the paradigm where the other one would be.
Gretchen: Itâs the same thing that happens in things like the English verb âto be,â which is âbe, am, is, are, was.â Why do some of them have B's in them and some of them have W's and some of them have neither? Itâs because they were once three different verbs.
Lauren: Just crashing into each other.
Gretchen: Yeah. But thatâs verbs. Weâre not in verbs right now. Weâre in nouns.
Lauren: I think âpeopleâ and âpersonâ 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 doesnât mean that it doesnât occasionally use these other things like âfoot/feet,â which is just a modification internal to the word, or âpersonâ and âpeople,â which is the suppletion, or âsheepâ and âsheepâ where thereâs no change at all.
Gretchen: There are some words like that in English: sheep/sheep, moose/moose.
Lauren: Emoji/emoji.
Gretchen: âEmojiâ is a really interesting one because some people say, âemoji/emoji,â and some people say, âemoji/emojis,â 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 âemojis.â Or do you make it more similar to what the source language does? In which case, it would be âemojiâ 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 âoctopusâ as if itâs English, it would just be âoctopuses.â Itâs very easy. But thereâs 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 itâs in English. So, if youâre going to pretend that âoctopusâ is Latin, then you wanna say, âoctopi.â However, there is yet a third complication, which is that âoctopus,â in fact, is actually Greek â âoctoâ meaning âeightâ and âpusâ meaning âfeet." 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, âoctopodesâ? (/aktaâËpodiz/)
Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, âoctopodes.â But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /akâtaËpodiz/.
Lauren: Youâve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.
Gretchen: I know, right? Which just sounds like, I dunno, like âSophoclesâ and âEuripidesâ and like another Greek playwright because, I guess, they are all Greek, to be fair. But âoctopodesâ really, really sounds like he should be writing some plays.
Lauren: Iâm looking forward to your Greek tragedy about octopuses... About those octopus-things.
Gretchen: Sea creatures of all kinds.
Lauren: Weâve 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, itâs also a really handy way to think about language if youâre learning a language.
Gretchen: When youâre learning a new language, itâs 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 youâre learning does something slightly differently. One of my favourite things in languages doing things differently is also that some languages donât have this singular/plural distinction. They make other kinds of distinctions in how many of something there is.
Lauren: Yeah. So, so far, weâve been looking a lot at the form and where it goes or how it changes the word and if itâs 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 thereâre two of something, which is known as the âdual,â as in the âduoâ-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-canât-un-see-this moments?
Gretchen: Yeah. Theyâre not even obscure.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: Lauren, whatâs the different between âbothâ and âallâ?
Lauren: âBothâ and âallâ? âBothâ means âtwoâ and âallâ means âeverythingâ?
Gretchen: Yeah! So, if I say, âBoth of us went to buy some booksâ versus âAll of us went to buy some books,â âallâ means âthree or more.â You canât use it for âtwo.â âAll of us,â you and me, Lauren, âwent to buy some books.â
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: No.
Lauren: AhhâŠ
Gretchen: Another one is âeitherâ versus âany.â
Lauren: Hmm... âeitherâ is a choice between two.
Gretchen: âEither of you can come.â
Lauren: And âanyâ is a choice between more than two. I canât force a definition of âanyâ that includes only two.
Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. âAny of you two can come.â You just canât 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 âneitherâ versus ânone.â
Lauren: Right, yeah.
Gretchen: So, if âeitherâ does it, âneitherâ also does it. Some people insist on a plural/dual distinction between âbetweenâ and âamong.â Whereas, other people donât have this distinction.
Lauren: Thatâs what that distinction that theyâre trying to get at is.
Gretchen: Yeah. But English doesnât really have a dual anymore, so do we still need it in these particular words? There is still one in âformerâ versus âfirstâ and âlatterâ versus âlast.â âI read this book and that book, and the former was really good, but the latter wasnât very good.â You canât do that with a list of three.
Lauren: Hmm, yeah.
Gretchen: Again, those are more obscure. âBothâ and âallâ and âeitherâ and âanyâ 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 â more of the pronouns used to have singular and dual and plural forms in English. âIâ and âwe twoâ and âwe all.â
Lauren: We sneakily havenât talked about pronouns at all because, obviously, pronouns donât just whack an S on the end of things the way that most normal nouns do. English doesnât even have a grammaticalized distinction anymore between plural and singular in second person â âyouâ and âyouâ â which is why people innovate things like âyousâ or âyaâll.â Formal English doesnât have a distinction.
Gretchen: Yeah, formal English doesnât. âYou guys,â âyou folksâ â 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 â with the exception of a few, and some of the languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent â 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 âambo,â which means âboth.â If youâre âambidextrous,â 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 âtwo,â youâll never guess what they call it in languages where it encodes âthree.â
Gretchen: Some languages have a trial.
Lauren: These include Austronesian languages and Austronesian-influenced creole languages including Bislama and Tok Pisin.
Gretchen: Thatâs 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 â obviously because theyâre 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 doesnât even though itâs 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 weâve not got languages that mark a specific number of anything more. We do have languages that mark something that means âa few,â so something thatâs 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, âoneâ of something or a âsingleâ amount of something. You can say a âcoupleâ or a âpair,â which is two â sometimes, occasionally extended to mean more than two. Like âIâll be there in a couple minutes.â If youâre there in three minutes, meh, I think thatâs still in the thing. People will really argue about this one. Then we have things like âa fewâ or a âhandfulâ or âa bit.â Then we have things like âmanyâ and âseveralâ and âa lot,â 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. Itâs 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 itâs so common that it actually has its own term, which is âpaucal.â P-A-U-C-A-L. Itâs a very satisfying word to say, âpaucal.â
Gretchen: I really like the word âpaucal.â You can look at number by a strict sort of counting. You can look at number by âa fewâ and âa lotâ and âmany.â 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 /kitabhĂŠÉŸu/, but I could also point at three books, a couple of notebooks, and some pens and say /kitabhĂŠÉŸu/, and it would still be technically correct.
Gretchen: So, /kitabhĂŠÉŸu/ doesnât just mean âbooksâ â because I canât use âbooksâ to mean the plural of âpensâ also.
Lauren: âBooks and associated materials.â
Gretchen: Ah, like âbooks and stuff.â
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, âGretchen-/hĂŠÉŸu/â and it would be like âGretchen and her family and associated peoples.â
Gretchen: Is this like when you say, âWishing you and yours a Happy New Yearâ or something like that?
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: âYou and yoursâ is like âyou and your familyâ or kinfolks or people that are associated with you?
Lauren: Yeah. Whatever that semantic meaning you have, thatâs kind of what /hĂŠÉŸu/ is doing in these sentences.
Gretchen: Huh, thatâs really interesting.
Lauren: Itâs a very elegant way of representing. We know you kind of mean âthis generally related content.â One of the really nice things about plurality is that itâs often something that is very easy to see in how itâs marked and how itâs used, so you can use things like Google Translate to play around. You can look at examples in things like childrenâs books. And you can begin to analyse plurals a bit like a linguist does as youâre 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 â 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 â 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 itâs fairly easy to ask somebody, you know, hereâs a stick. Hereâs two sticks. Hereâs three sticks. You can kind of point at them, and people can generally figure out what youâre asking, and they can answer that. Itâs 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. Itâs an easy thing to learn at the beginning when youâre starting out learning a language.
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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, other Lingthusiasm merch and gifts at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.
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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, and our music is âAncient Citiesâ by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
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