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Re: Doubts about plural forms, and parts of speech

 

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Leandro Regueiro
<leandro.regueiro@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

Sorry for replying again. In
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms#c I saw that
Welsh has 4 plural forms, and if I see well you only talked about two.

>> 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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