Prefixed / proclitic plurals

[Hannu Tommola]

What Urmas suggests is true for other Finnic languages: in Finnish this is 
even more clear in the nominative of the pronouns
         se SG / ne PL 'this, it / 'those'
         tämä SG / nämä PL 'this' / 'these'
         tuo SG / nuo PL 'that' / 'those'
  because the difference to the Singular is marked by the first consonant only.
But this is probably rather a case of suppletion than inflection.

Hannu Tommola

At 15:33 19.9.2001 +0300, Urmas Sutrop« wrote:
>Dear colleagues,
>
>there is a small closed group of words with prefixed plural
>marking in Estonian:
>
>see ‘this’
>need ‘these’
>n-ee-d
>PL-this-PL
>
>too ‘that’
>nood ‘those’
>n-oo-d
>PL-that-PL
>
>tema (ta) ‘he, she’
>nemad (nad) ‘they’
>n-ema-d (n-a-d)
>PL-s/he-PL (PL-s/he-PL)
>
>Yours sincerely,
>Urmas Sutrop
>*********************
>
>Dr. Urmas Sutrop
>Director
>Institute of the Estonian Language
>Roosikrantsi 6
>EE-10119 Tallinn
>ESTONIA
>
>E-mail: Urmas.Sutrop at eki.ee
>Phone : +372-6449843
>Phone & Fax: +372-6411443
>Mobile Phone: +372-5207188

Hannu Tommola, Professor of Russian Language, School of Modern Languages 
and Translation Studies, FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland, Tel.: 
+358-(0)3-215 6102, Fax:(0)3-215 7200, http://www.uta.fi/~trhato