Re: Chinese-style measure words in English?

From: Odysseus (odysseus1479-at_at_yahoo-dot.ca)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:59:37 GMT

John Atkinson wrote:
>
> > "Odysseus" <odysseus1479-at@yahoo-dot.ca> wrote...

<snip>

> > > It's probably a vestige of counting by reference to supplementary
> > > quantities (e.g. body parts or collections of sticks or pebbles), an
> > > early step in the abstraction of numbers from the objects they
> > > enumerate.
>
> This may be true of the east and south-east asian languages, but it can't be
> the origin of the very similar classifiers used with nouns in many northern
> Australian and Amazonian languages. In these languages, words for numbers
> (above two or three) don't exist, so any counting they do can't be a
> linguistic activity for their speakers.
>

Do they perhaps function more like markers of grammatical gender,
then? Or is that something else again? 

-- 
Odysseus

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