tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 30 19:21:47 2006

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Re: yopwaH

Mark E. Shoulson ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

Regarding nouns whose number is different in different languages,


Steven Boozer (Voragh) wrote:


> Hebrew:
>
> heaven - shamayim (dual)
> life - Hayim (dual)
> water - mayim (dual)
> Jerusalem - Yerushalayim (dual)
> G-d - Elohim (pl!)

And naturally I can't pass up anything that mentions Hebrew.  (Also I 
need to test something out on the list).

It isn't clear that mayim and shamayim are dual and not plural; since 
they're treated as mass-nouns in Hebrew as they are in English, and just 
construe grammatically as plurals, they might be simple plurals.  The 
form is a dual-looking form, but that doesn't prove things.

Similarly, Jerusalem might *look* dual, but it isn't at all!  Jerusalem 
is singular and feminine, like all cities are.  In a sentence, 
adjectives and verbs agreeing with Jerusalem are in singular feminine.  
Just because it looks plural doesn't mean it is ('achot/sister is 
singular, and looks plural).

In the same way, Elohim when used to mean "God with a capital G" (the 
One God the Bible is always talking about), although it looks plural 
(and is plural in other uses) construes as a singular masculine noun.  
It also means "gods with a lowercase g", i.e. "other" gods, as opposed 
to big-G God, and in that case it is treated as masculine plural, as one 
might expect.  "Adonay", also a word used for God's name, is also 
technically plural in form; it means "my lords" when used in mundane 
contexts.  I think these have to do with a sort of plural of respect.  
In the Talmud, you see words like "lord" or "owner", even when referring 
to the owner of the animal in the civil case under discussion, written 
in plural forms.

I recently heard a great way of thinking about the way Japanese does 
things.  In Japanese, all nouns are mass nouns!  (Quick review: 
count-nouns are nouns you can count: one book, three glasses.  
Mass-nouns don't have numbers: cake, water, food.  A lot of mass nouns 
in English also have count-noun meanings, like "cake", but still we 
usually say "three pieces of cake"; "three cakes" has a special 
meaning).  In English when we have a mass-noun that we want to count, we 
have to instantiate it over counters: three *slices* of pizza, twelve 
*sheets* of paper, nine *blocks* of iron.  So too, in Japanese, wherein 
all nouns are mass nouns, you need counters for everything.  So you have 
to say "seven humans of Samurais" (shichi nin no samurai) and so on.  
They have a whole set of counters (which someone else here certainly 
knows better than I do)... long things, bound things, flat things... So 
you say "five bound-things of book(s)."  And so forth.

On the whole, I suspect Klingons don't sweat the details of these 
edge-cases too much.  I would imagine there would be a reasonable amount 
of usage on both sides and such things are debated only by the really 
pedantic and careful.

~mark

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