In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I’m amazed that ancient people put enough emphasis on past/present/future to justify having irregular verbs. They must have had a very strange conception of time.
But then I’m also amazed that Russian doesn’t have a definite article...
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I think what Thomblake would like (and which is how I understand Japanese to work) is to be to use a noun without specifying whether or not it is plural, and have extra (not necessarily “grammatical categories”) contructs for adding the extra information of whether it is plural or not.
E.g.
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Oh, I hung out with {friend}.”
“Really? Were there a lot of people?”
“Nope, just one {friend}.” / “Yes, many {friend}.” / “Well, it was three {friend}.”
So it’s not new grammatical categories (as long as you don’t consider just prefixing the word “three” to be a new grammatical category).
The way English works, there’s no way to use a noun while leaving the “1 vs not 1” information ambiguous. If you leave off the “s”, you must be referring to exactly one instance. If you put the “s”, you must be referring to a non-1 instance (possibly zero instances).
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I’m amazed that ancient people put enough emphasis on past/present/future to justify having irregular verbs. They must have had a very strange conception of time.
But then I’m also amazed that Russian doesn’t have a definite article...
I think what Thomblake would like (and which is how I understand Japanese to work) is to be to use a noun without specifying whether or not it is plural, and have extra (not necessarily “grammatical categories”) contructs for adding the extra information of whether it is plural or not.
E.g.
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Oh, I hung out with {friend}.”
“Really? Were there a lot of people?”
“Nope, just one {friend}.” / “Yes, many {friend}.” / “Well, it was three {friend}.”
So it’s not new grammatical categories (as long as you don’t consider just prefixing the word “three” to be a new grammatical category).
The way English works, there’s no way to use a noun while leaving the “1 vs not 1” information ambiguous. If you leave off the “s”, you must be referring to exactly one instance. If you put the “s”, you must be referring to a non-1 instance (possibly zero instances).