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<DIV>Talking about number: it is really interesting how the word "troops"
is used these days.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>"Troop" originally was a collective noun referring to a group of people.
But more recently it has also been used in reference to individuals. Thus
"a hundred troops" primarily refers to a hundred soldiers and not to a hundred
groups of them.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>What is particularly interesting is that, when it is used for a plurality
of invididuals, it sounds better (to me) if the numeral is large: "a
hundred troops" is better than "five troops" or "two troops". And using the
singular "troop" in reference to a single person is even stranger (?"Over
there I saw a troop") although Mickey Noonan reports to have found
occurrences of it on the web, some from The New York Times. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mickey has also pointed out to me that "troop" may not be used in American
military language for a unit anymore and this may reduce somewhat the ambiguity
of the collective versus individual use of the word.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The meaning change of "troop" is similar to the story of the word "folk",
which was also merely a collective noun earlier but now "folks" is used for a
plurality of individuals although its use with a numeral (?"two folks") sounds
strange (at least to my non-native ears).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Another somewhat analogous case is "people" - also a collective
originally I believe but now used for individuals. But it is not quite
like "troops" and "folks" since you cannot say "peoples" for a plurality of
individuals.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Interestingly, in Hungarian, too, the word for "people" ("ne'p") - a
collective noun - can be used in the plural to refer to a plurality of
individuals; but it does not sound right to me with numerals and the singular
cannot be used for a single individual. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>A similar phenomenon is mentioned in G. Corbett's book Number (Cambridge
UP, 2000, 119): Proto-Slavic derived collective stems have been reanlysed as
plural noun stems in various Slavic languages.</DIV>
<DIV>To round out the picture: collective markers evolving into additive-plural
markers</DIV>
<DIV>are attested for several languages.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Edith</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Edith A. Moravcsik<BR>Professor of Linguistics<BR>Department of
Foreign<BR> Languages and Linguistics<BR>University of
Wisconsin-<BR> Milwaukee<BR>Milwaukee, WI
53201-0413</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>E-mail: <A href="mailto:edith@uwm.edu">edith@uwm.edu</A><BR>Tel: (414)
229-6794<BR>Fax: (414) 229-2741</DIV></BODY></HTML>