[Lexicog] lexical entries as singulars or plurals

[Fritz Goerling]

David,

You have worked with creolized French in St. Lucia.
Here is a funny example from creolized Ivorian French:
First I mention the singular for "eye" in French French which is "oeil."
The plural, as you know, is "yeux." Now in Ivorian French you might
hear "Mon yeux droit me fait mal" (My right YEUX/eyes hurts me).
Maybe some day there will be a  dictionary in Ivorian French with just the
entry "yeux" for "eye" as the singular AND plural form taken from  the
original French French plural form.
Another one: You know that French singular "egg" is "oeuf", but the plural
is pronounced "ö" (written: "oeufs"). But in Ivorian French "one egg" is
"un neuf" and "two eggs" are "deux neufs." So what are "nine eggs"? :-)

Why not! Languages are dynamic.

Fritz


  Bill Poser wrote:

  ...A related situation that I have encountered is one in which the basic
form of a noun is normally understood as a dual and there exists a
singulative form that can be used if one wants to be clear that one is
referring to a single member of the pair. In Carrier this is true of nouns
that naturally come in pairs, such as "eye" and "hand". If you say /sna/ it
will normally be interpreted as "my eyes". If you are singling out one eye,
you say /snak'uz/ "my one eye", or "side of eye", if you like. The
suffix -k'uz is also used with single things that are considered as
consisting of two halves, e.g. a side of beef, or in Carrier culture more
commonly, a side of fish. (Treated as an inalienably possessed noun, -k'uz
means "a half, a side", and therefore 50 cents.)

  from David Frank:

  What you reported for Carrier stirred up in my memory something very
similar in St. Lucian French Creole (though St. Lucian is much less complex
grammatically than Carrier). The word soulyé means 'shoe' or 'shoes'. Most
nouns can be unspecified in number as long as the NP is not definite. So if
you say, I volé soulyé mwen, that could mean "He/she stole my shoe" or
"He/she stole my shoes." The number is not specified. If you attach a
definite article to the noun, then you have to specify singular or plural.

  In our dictionary, we also have the word koté. The first sense of that
word is 'side' and the second is 'half of a pair (of shoes, socks, etc.)'
The example sentence is An dansé-a i té pwen yon koté soulyé tifi-a, "At the
danse he had taken one of the girl's shoes." In this context, where the
definite article is not attached to the word for "shoe," to make it clear
that only one of the girl's two shoes is being referred to, you literally
say, "he took one side [of the pair] of the girl's shoes."


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