Dear Log,
«
We see that the form of the noun is reduced when it is used with a prefixed adjective: moosa = a cat becomes -mosa = a ... cat, and kiihu = house becomes -ki = a ... house. Some nouns even change further: pooko = a dog turns into -voko = a ... dog, as in qötsa-voko = a white dog. Adjectives can be added one on top of the other: wukó-qötsa-voko = a big white dog; and they can be negated using qa- = not: qahopmosa = naughty cat, which is subdivided thus: qa-hop-mosa = not-well-behaved-cat (from hopi/hop- = well-behaved).»The adjective 'little, small' is rendered by an ending, -hoya, comparable to the German ending -chen as in German Blümchen = little flower from German Blume = flower. In Hopi we have for example: qötsámomoshoyam = little white cats, which is structured thus: *qötsá-moo-mo-sa-hoya-m = white-cat-(reduplication)-little-(plural). (Note that the -sh- is not the English 'sh' but rather an s followed by an h.)
Finnish numbers are evil as they are compound and every word inside the whole compound gets inflected, e.g. the number '28' in nominative, genitive and partative cases
It's wacky!
Re:you should see finnish inflections
TorgoX on 2002-02-11T00:59:17
Wouldn't much of the apparent problem go away if they wrote it like "kahden-kymmenen-kahdeksan" or something?You want evil, look at numbers in Russian (and to a certain extent the other Slavic languages), which I mention in my TPJ13 Maketext Article (soon to appear in the Best of TPJ books from O'Reilly). They project case onto the nouns they quantify, in horrible ways that depend on the number. I don't remember the details (and I never could figure out all the rules) but it's like: 1-3 (and compounds thereof) project, say, nominative, but 4 and 7 force genitive plural, and it gets crazier from there.
