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Text of the page (random words):
ou 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 music 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 lauren i tweet and blog as superlinguo to listen to bonus episodes and help 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