thanks for irregular noun plurals(suppletion)

[gilbert read]

Thanks to those who replied for my request to see if
there were any languages where the plural forms of
nouns are suppletive.  I did not realise that there
were a few examples in Russian and Arabic and that
they are common enough in Papuan and other languages
whose grammars were not readily available when I was
checking for suppletive plural forms.  I was looking
for more than examples of plurals so irregular that
the connection with the original stem was hard to
recognise, or with defective declensions etc.
              In fact I was having so much trouble
finding convincing examples that I was starting to
think the lack of them was some sort of linguistic
universal or at least a linguistic universal tendency.
Moral: Don't even start to think of a linguistic
universal until looking at Papuan and Caucasian
languages.  Once again Thanks

                   Gilbert


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