Plural forms of Ojibwe (oj)

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi Anthony!

On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 06:02:05PM -0400, Anthony Yarusso wrote:
> 0 items:  There is no term for zero in Ojibwe.  In most cases, this
> would be applied with a negative, for instance the negated form of
> "there are items".  For things like telephone numbers, usually English
> must be used to get around this.
> 
> 1 item: This is the standard or base way of referring to things.
> 
> 2+ items: Anything other than 0 or 1 would use the plural form.  This is
> generally done by adding a suffix to the word, or modifying another
> suffix to combine them.  (This language combines many parts of a thought
> into a single written word; this also applies to the negative case
> described for zero.)  For instance, potato is pin, while potato is
> piniik, robin is pichi and robins is pichwak (can also be written with
> the i, pichiwak).  Plate is naagan, plates are naagnan (think of this as
> naaganan).

To get this straight, how would you say "-1 chair, 0 chairs, 1 chair and
3 chairs?

If I understand correctly, Ojibwe has three disctinct plural forms, one
for n < 1, one for n =1 and another for n > 1. Am I right?

> Additional note: Numbers are usually only used on their own for
> counting.  If referring to a measurement, they are combined with the
> unit of measurement.  For instance, niish is 2, niizhing is "two times",
> niizh-zit is "two feet", and niizho-bboon is "two years".  Also, in the
> case of 1, the counting term and the unit prefix are different.  1 is
> bezhik, while "one year" is ngo-bboon.

wow, that's pretty cool.

Jordi, used to the boring counting rules of Romance languages. :)
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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