Formal Expression of Number
Synthetic languages typically distinguish grammatical number by inflection. (Note that analytic languages, such as Chinese, do not have grammatical number.) Some languages have no marker for the plural in certain cases, e. g. Swedish hus --"house, houses" (but huset --"the house", husen --"the houses"). In most languages, the singular is formally unmarked, whereas the plural is marked in some way. Other languages, most notably the Bantu languages, mark both the singular and the plural, for instance Swahili (see example below). The third logical possibility, rarely found in languages, is an unmarked plural contrasting with marked singular. Below are some examples of number affixes for nouns (where the inflecting morphemes are underlined):
- Affixation (by adding or removing prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes):
- Estonian puu "tree, wood" (singular) – puud "the trees, woods" (nominative plural)
- Finnish: lehmä "cow, the cow" (singular) – lehmät "the cows" (nominative plural)
- Slovene: lipa "linden" (singular) – lipi "linden" (dual) – lipe "linden" (plural)
- Tamil "Aan","Pen" "Man,Woman, (Male,Female )" (Singular) – AanKal, Penkal "Two or more Man,Woman (Males, Females)
- Sanskrit puruṣas "man" (singular) – puruṣau "two men" (dual) – puruṣās "men" (plural)
- Swahili: mtoto "child" (singular) – watoto "children" (plural)
- Ganda: omusajja "man" (singular) – abasajja "men" (plural)
- Georgian: კაცი k'aci "man" (singular) – კაცები k'acebi "men" (where -i is the nominative case marker)
- Simulfix (through various kinds of internal sound alternations):
- Arabic: كِتَاب kitāb "book" (singular) – كُتُب kutub "books" (plural)
- Apophony (alternating between different vowels):
- Welsh: bachgen "boy" – bechgyn "boys"
- Reduplication (through doubling):
- Indonesian: orang "person" (singular) – orang-orang "people" (plural); BUT dua orang "two people" and banyak orang "many people" (reduplication is not done when the context is clear and when the plurality is not emphasized)
- Somali: buug "book" (singular) – buug-ag "books" (plural)
- Suppletion (the use of the one word as the inflected form of another word):
- Serbo-Croatian: čovjek "man" (singular) – ljudi "men, folks" (plural)
- Tonality (by changing a drag tone to a push tone)
- Limburgish: daãg "day" (singular) – daàg "days" (plural)
Elements marking number may appear on nouns and pronouns in dependent-marking languages or on verbs and adjectives in head-marking languages.
| English (dependent-marking) |
Western Apache (head-marking) |
|---|---|
| Paul is teaching the cowboy. | Paul idilohí yiłch’ígó’aah. |
| Paul is teaching the cowboys. | Paul idilohí yiłch’ídagó’aah. |
In the English sentence above, the plural suffix -s is added to the noun cowboy. In the equivalent in Western Apache, a head-marking language, a plural infix da- is added to the verb yiłch’ígó’aah "he is teaching him", resulting in yiłch’ídagó’aah "he is teaching them" while noun idilohí "cowboy" is unmarked for number.
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Number
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