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Re: Doubts about plural forms, and parts of speech

 

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Tony Pursell
<ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 16:20 +0200, Leandro Regueiro wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am trying to design and build a terminology discussion system, and I
>> have some doubts about the plural forms. I am used to languages like
>> english, spanish or galician that have two plural forms that we call
>> "singular" and "plural", but since I plan to create a system able to
>> handle all languages I need some information about weird plural forms
>> (at least for me) like the Polish, Irish, Welsh, Russian, Serbian or
>> the Arabic ones, for mention some of them. Do you have a specific name
>> for every one of your language plural forms? Can you list that names?
>>
>> I also have doubts about the part of speech names. As I said above I
>> am used to certain languages where we have verbs, substantives,
>> adjectives, etc. Maybe the languages I chose are not the best ones,
>> and perhaps I should ask for languages from India, southwestern Asia
>> or Africa, but can you provide me a list of parts of speech for your
>> languages as well?
>>
>>
>> A lot of thanks,
>>                           Leandro Regueiro
>>
>
> Hi Leandro
>
> Welsh has singular (unigol) and plural (lluosog) forms of nouns.
>
> The main problem with Welsh is that there are no 'regular' plurals (like
> the way adding an 's' forms the majority of plurals in English).  There
> are a number of ways plurals are formed but no easy rules to determine
> which applies to a particular noun (e.g adding 'au' or 'od') and no
> special terminology to describe the rules.
>
> Like many languages there are collective nouns, plural nouns and
> dual/double nouns, but these are, to me, just semantic distinctions as
> they generally all have singular forms.  For instance, 'dwylaw' (hands -
> literally 'two hands') can be called a dual noun, or just be seen as the
> irregular plural of 'llaw' (hand).
>
> Other parts of speech in Welsh are much the same as the languages you
> are familiar with. Welsh does have its own grammatical constructs which
> are not found in those languages (to my knowledge) but without knowing
> more about the requirements of your 'terminology discussion system' I
> would not know if discussion of them is relevant.
>
> Tony

Thanks for your reply, Tony.

Googling I found
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Parts_of_speech which has links
to pages with part of speech lists for several languages (most of them
partial lists). I want to know if your language has parts of speech
different to: verb, adverb, noun, adjective, conjunction, pronoun,
preposition which are the ones I am used to. Since welsh is an
indo-european language I suppose it has common parts of speech to
other languages I know. I already said in my first message that maybe
is better to do this question for other languages (not indo-aryan
languages), but I appreciate your reply.

Thanks again.



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