From: Jan van Steenbergen (ijzeren_jan@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon May 12 2003 - 16:32:47 EST
--- Padraic Brown skrzypszy:
> Not necessarily. It depends on construction:
> English is notorious for using the singular after
> numbers where you might logically expect a
> plural.
Dutch can do that in certain situations. For example, amounts of money always
have the currency in singular: "vijf dollar", "zevenentwintig gulden", "honderd
euro".
Some other instances that come to my mind:
"vijf keer" (five times);
"vijf jaar" (five years);
"vijf man" and "vijf mannen" are both possible, but in the first case you mean
"five people", probably but not necessarily all male, while in the second case
you emphasize the fact that they are all male.
> The ordinal, yes I agree that the singular would
> be usual.
Indeed, I can't think of any practical example.
> > Probably in the same way as French "cinq" and
> > "quinze" are related. ;))
>
> But those are five and fifteen respectively, no?
Yes, but they still derive from the same root.
> Chimvi and findu are (or seem to be) cinq and
> cinquième (? - it's been a while!) respectively.
> Quinque and quintus, anyway.
True, but would that really matter for a native speaker of Carradjena? I mean,
no native speaker of English seems to have a problem that "two" and "second"
look somewhat differently. Usually, native speakers take their language for
granted, including its oddities. Only very few people in the Netherlands are
aware of the fact that it is odd that we say "acht" for 8, and "tachtig" for
80.
Jan
=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones
__________________________________________________
Yahoo! Plus
For a better Internet experience
http://www.yahoo.co.uk/btoffer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri Oct 03 2003 - 12:19:46 EST