number

[Matthew S Dryer]

I sent the following message to LINGTYP a couple of days ago in response
to Bingfu Lu's query about number, but since at least some people appear
not to have received it, I send it again, though most of these points have
been made by others the past couple of days.

"Many languages, perhaps even a majority, allow bare nouns to be
interpreted as singular or plural in that plural marking is not required.
Among languages that do not inflect nouns for number at all, some employ
plural words, and many, probably the majority of these, do not require
classifiers.  Among those that lack either plural inflection or plural
words, I suspect many do not require classifiers.  Kutenai is an example
of this."

Matthew Dryer