Warrigal comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong

109 Post author: Yvain 19 March 2009 01:07AM

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Comment author: thomblake 19 March 2009 05:47:46PM *  3 points [-]

I agree. And after studying Japanese, I started to find it silly that English (like most Western languages) makes the distinction between 'singular' and 'plural'. Like whether we're talking about exactly 1 thing or any number other than 1 is information important enough to encode with every noun, but it's usually not worth mentioning what the particular number is.

ETA: exactly what Nebu said below.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 September 2009 01:01:58AM 2 points [-]

I feel like mentioning that English seems to be quite tolerant of not making the singular/plural distinction. When borrowing from languages that don't make this distinction (in my experience, Japanese and Lojban), it seems that people simply use the existing form for both singular and plural: "This gismu is different from all other gismu in that instead of taking just one sumti or finitely many sumti, it can take infinitely many sumti."

Comment author: taryneast 22 June 2011 03:36:54PM 1 point [-]

Doesn't even have to be non-english words:

"this sheep is different from other sheep in that it thinks that it is a fish unlike these fish that think they are sheep"

/contrived_example