Talk:Grammatical number

message: --Eldin raigmore (talk) 15:16, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

message: I don't have the time for this right now, but someone who does might take a look at the French version of this article. It's quite well written, and could help improve the English version a great deal. FilipeS 13:10, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: However the French version of this article contains errors; in particular it refers to the quadral ("quadriel") number of Sursunga in New Ireland, which as we have seen here is not a quadral grammatical number. --198.111.164.158 (talk) 00:34, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

text: That isn't a paucal form, it's the use of a collective term with the plural, no different from "a dozen geese" or "a gross of geese". A paucal form would be if there were a third form in addition to "goose" and "geese" and that form were used for some small set of numbers greater than 1 and less than the numbers to which the plural applies. Imagine a system like one goose, two goosen, three goosen, four goosen, five goosen, six geese, seven geese, .... —Largo Plazo (talk) 11:04, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion for improving the article 

message: There is no such word as "quadrual". The correct word is "quadral".
There is no such grammatical number as "quadral". It has been extensively investigated, and the consensus of the world's linguists after some four decades is that no natural language has such a grammatical number, and there is no evidence tending to indicate that any natural language ever did.
Eldin raigmore (talk) 14:32, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  There is no such word as "quadrual"; and there is no such grammatical number as "quadral". 

message: At 08:22, 27 February 2009 Cesium 133 revised the "Grammatical Number" article's "Types of Number" section to include a subsection on "Quadrual" . 
In doing so s/he made the following mistakes. (I hope s/he won't be offended by this list; I've made plenty of similar mistakes, and probably didn't know not to until my late thirties.)
First mistake: S/he cited the online source , which is about bases for numeral systems (such as binary, decimal, hexadecimal, vigesimal, etc.), not about grammatical number (such as single, plural, etc.).  
A more careful reading of the part of Note 49  having to do with Aristotle's remarks about the Thracians might have made him/her suspicious that the author's first sentence in that note was wrong; Aristotle was saying the Thracians used a base-four numeral system, not that they had a quadral grammatical number. So the author T. E. Rihll was already wrong when Cesium 133 quoted him. (In fact, while most numeral systems with a base use ten or twenty, some of Greenberg's students reported that twelve and five and four were among the most common bases other than ten or twenty.)
Second mistake: S/he also cited the book Gregersen, Edgar A., "Language in Africa", p. 62 http://books.google.com/books?id=w4lytWv1JKAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Gregersen,+Edgar+A.,+%22Language+in+Africa%22#v=onepage&q=quadrual&f=false to support a statement about Marshallese.  But Gregersen's book doesn't discuss Marshallese at all because Marshallese is not an African language and isn't spoken in Africa.  Gregersen only said "... quadrual (four), is reported for Marshalese in the Pacific but does not occur at all in Africa.".  If Cesiium 133 wanted to follow that up s/he should have found Gregersen's source for that remark in Gregersen's bibliography or references and found a quote in that, rather than just this unsupported comment from Gregersen.
Third mistake: S/he spelled the word "quadrual". A quick search of the web would have shown that "quadrual" was not the right spelling; for instance the Cambridge dictionary  does not contain any such lexeme.  Both of the sources mentioned above also mis-spelled it, but they were wrong.  The correct spelling is "quadral" (without the second "u"), not "quadrual".
Fourth mistake: S/he did not do a literature search to find out that the notion that any language has a "quadral grammatical number" is out-of-date and has been since 2000. In June of 1994http://linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-731.html#1http://linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-702.html#4 Greville Corbett was trying to get the world's linguists to help him find what he needed to know to write the "CAMBRIDGE TEXTBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS" volume "NUMBER"http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/40169/frontmatter/9780521640169_frontmatter.pdf. By sometime in 2000http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/number.htmlhttp://www.emeld.org/workshop/2005/papers/kibort-paper.html he had all their responses and found that no report of a "quadral grammatical number" had been borne out.  It isn't just a matter of disagreement between professionals; for at least two of the three languages that were regarded as most likely to actually have a quadral number, the field-researcher who found that it did not after all, was the same as the field-researcher who raised the possibility in the first place.
So.
Please remember that your sources can contain misprints; please remember that your sources can be out-of-date; and please remember that your sources can be just plain wrong.  
Try to find at least two hard-copy sources for each fact you state.  
Also, do a literature search, or at least a search of the web or of Google or of Wikipedia or something, to find out if those sources are in a minority regarding the factuality of your statement.  
And, make sure that your sources' topic actually has something to do with the topic of the statement you are putting in the wiki; if it doesn't, then try to find out what the source's source was for that statement, and keep going back until you find a book or paper by an actual expert on that topic.  Then search forward to see if that expert has published anything more recent contradicting that.
In some cases the same term might be used differently in different fields.  Cesium 133 and T. E. Rihll seemed to assume that "quadrual" meant "base four" the same way "decimal" means "base ten" and "vigesimal" means "base twenty".  But the base for the numeral system has nothing to do with the grammatical number; if it did, English would either have grammatical numbers singular, dual, trial, quadral, pental, sexal, septal, octal, nonal, decimal, and plural; or, English's numeral system would be "base one".--Eldin raigmore (talk) 17:47, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quadrual and the Need for Checking your Sources' Sources' Sources 

message: 16:38, 6 January 2010 Eldin raigmore (talk | contribs) (30,404 bytes) (Undid revision 335610587 by Kwamikagami 
Kwamikagami: That's not what Corbett's book said.  The difference, according to his book, is not "roughly 'few' vs 'several'", as you say; rather, the difference seems to be between a tightly-connected group and a loosely-connected group. --Eldin raigmore (talk) 16:42, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: If you know that the particular edition of Corbett's book which was quoted, was in fact wrong, please cite your more-up-to-date reference.  If you know that what was said in Corbett's book is not true of one or some of the mentioned languages, please distinguish which languages were erroneously reported as having a trial (that should have been called "lesser paucal") and a quadral (that should have been called "greater paucal"), and give a reference. --Eldin raigmore (talk) 16:59, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  16:38, 6 January 2010 Eldin raigmore  (Undid revision 335610587 by Kwamikagami  

message: I put a "citation needed" template on the "no known language has trial number in its nouns" clause. --Eldin raigmore (talk) 16:53, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Also; "some registers of Tok Pisin have trial ..."? Which registers? --Eldin raigmore (talk) 17:20, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

text: There's still no citation, and the statement as written seems to imply that trial is limited to pronouns. I can't confirm or refute the claim that inflection of the trial directly on nouns doesn't occur, but John Lynch's grammar of Lenakel indicates that it inflects verbs and adjectives to the trial. I don't have a clear idea on how to communicate the distinction in-article, but I'm going to delete the relevant sentence. Ambisinistral (talk) 09:09, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  I have added some sources about Austronesian languages and Bislama, with a reference to "person agreement markers". I've looked up in Corbett (2001) for anything about trial number marking for nouns, but there is no explicit statement about it. In chapter 3 which is about nominal number marking, there is no mention of trial and paucal, and on p. 255, this made me smirk: "Kiwai, where verbal number distinguishes two forms, but the nominal number system (expressed on the verb) has singular, dual, trial, plural" (italics added). –Austronesier (talk) 10:11, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  What source says no language is known to have trial number in its nouns? 

message: In Texas (that I know of) and perhaps elsewhere, the pronoun "y'all" is used for small groups of people; for larger groups, speakers will say "all y'all". For example, to a group of five friends, "Y'all come on over next Saturday, y'hear?", but to a crowd, "All y'all please stand for the National Anthem." Would "y'all" in this usage effectively be a paucal?--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:45, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: If that were true, yes; but in my 'lect of Texan it isn't so. "You" is second person singular and "you all" or "y'all" is second person plural; "all y'all" is emphatic about the "'all" part, that is, explicitly includes each and every addressee. --Eldin raigmore (talk) 17:37, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting. I grew up in Oklahoma, and even my east Texas relatives didn't use "all y'all", so I know of it only from a few examples and from attestation.--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:47, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paucal in Southern American English? 

message: The article says: "Dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European [...] and can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Icelandic and Slovene language." As far as I know, Icelandic has no dual. Old Norse had a dual only with pronouns already, and I believe Icelandic does not have even that. 189.96.240.243 (talk) 17:55, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't speak Icelandic, but I remember reading that the Icelandic "dual" pronouns (i.e. the ones that came from Old Norse) are these days used, if at all, only to mark respect (think T-V) and not at all for number.  But I think I may have just been reading this in a "teach yourself Icelandic" type phrasebook, not necessarily a reliable source.Eniagrom (talk) 21:22, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, you've got it exactly backwards: it's the dual pronouns which have become the regular plural pronouns, while the original plural pronouns are considered formal, poetic or archaic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:40, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dual in Icelandic? 

message: The article Classifiers with Number Morphology discusses one way that grammatical number is realized in languages with classifier systems. Since it is essentially an aspect of grammatical number and consists of two paragraphs plus several example sentences, I propose that it should be merged to Grammatical number. Cnilep (talk) 14:37, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge from [[Classifiers with Number Morphology]] 

message: The article says: "The third logical possibility, rarely found in languages, is an unmarked plural contrasting with marked singular." Are there any languages with marked singular and unmarked plural? I've never encountered such a language in all my studies. Somebody should add an actual example of such a plural form to the article, or else remove this statement.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.182.13.11 (talk) 16:00, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think a marked singulative with an unmarked plural is a situation found in most nouns in any language I've ever read about.  However I think I have read of languages in which a certain special small class of nouns were marked in this way. If I can find some such examples I'll post them. Eldin raigmore (talk) 00:00, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

text: Singulative number mentions Welsh as one of those languages. Eldin raigmore (talk) 13:52, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Unmarked plural with marked singular" - is there such a thing? 

message: The article says the modern English and French have only two grammatical numbers, singular and plural. This is not so. In modern English, "eight" is the dual of "four", suprisingly.
:Probably, all modern Indo-European languages have a fragmentary dual.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.181.11.197 (talk) 12:03, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct that eight is two times four, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of grammatical number. You either have one cow or you have two or four or eight or even nine cows. There is no different form of the word "cow" ( or indeed, any other word) that is used exclusively to indicate two. Wschart (talk) 18:11, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: "Eight" is not the dual of "four" in any way that makes sense. Ben (talk) 19:35, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not so 

message: under types of number, then under dual, an example is "twice vs. <number> times" however that specific example seems incorrect because the word thrice exists, and I believe there is a word for up to ten times, I was thinking about removing the example, but I figured I'd ask opinions first. Hallaman3 (talk) 18:57, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll go ahead and change it. Hallaman3 (talk) 00:54, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thrice 

message: I think the "Number in specific languages" section could use an example of a language with optional number marking.  Perhaps Indonesian, as it's used in the "Formal expression of number" section.
Is the level of detail for "quadral" necessary if there are no known instances of it in any natural language? I understand that it provides a more comprehensive history of types of numbers, but it goes into more detail than some of the types that have been observed.
Someone who knows more about it than I should see if they can do anything with the "Distributive plural" section, as the sentence seems to be incomplete.  It is missing sources as well. This in particular may be of interest. - LewisHaas (talk) 06:18, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Optional number markings/Types 

message: I read this section a number of times and I can't make head or tail of what it is saying. Besides linguists, who is going to get any joy of writing like that? Rui Gabriel Correia (talk) 16:45, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inverse number 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Before my edit the sentences I edited seemed to say that the Tokelauan language consists only of its pronouns, or only of its greetings. I’m sure the original editor meant “has” instead of “ consists of “. Eldin raigmore (talk) 17:35, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tokelauan — “has” instead of “consists of” 

message: The article says "Polish functions similarly: 'one dog' is jeden pies', while (2, 3, 4 psy – dogs, pl.; but 5+ psów - dogs, gen. pl.).". This is not quite accurate. The gen. pl. form is indeed used for some numbers but it is when last word of the number is 2, 3 and 4, which means when last digit is 2, 3 or 4, except when the number ends with 12, 13 or 14 
http://www.rjp.pan.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1011:skadnia-liczebnikow-70&catid=44&Itemid=145 (I couldn't find a reliable source in English)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:110F:612:DA00:F025:21B1:D103:DE2B (talk) 10:30, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Polish Paucal  

message: In 2013,  added an unsourced claim that Kurmanji/N. Kurdish has a paucal. In this question on Linguistics Stack Exchange, a user has questioned this, and said that they have looked for evidence for this claim, and not found any. 
So I have marked it with . If somebody on Stack Exchange answers with a reliable source, I will add the source to this article. ColinFine (talk) 19:20, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paucal in Kurdish