Questions tagged [paucal]
For questions about the paucal, denoting "a few".
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Does Northern Kurdish actually have a paucal number?
For the past 10+ years, the Wikipedia article "Grammatical number" has stated:
Of the Indo-European languages, Kurmanji (also known as Northern Kurdish) is one of the few known languages ...
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Does paucal always represent the same number range per language?
In some hypothetical language, could ten grains of rice be paucal but ten people be plural because ten grains of rice are only a few, whereas ten people are a lot?
Or is paucal grammatically stricter ...
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What is the origin of the paucal form?
I just recently learned about the distinction between paucal and plural forms in my native Serbo-Croatian.
Designating groups of counted nouns as smaller or larger than five adds complexity to the ...
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Proper terminology for the types of dual
I was reading an article about typology of Russian language by Gasparov, B. M. (“Structure of Russian language from typological point of view (Intro to sociogrammatics). Article 2. Morphology of the ...
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The paucal to denote between three to six individuals
According to the paper cited in this answer, in a "usual case" the paucal denotes between three to six individuals.
How common is the limit "three to six"? Is there any reason that those languages ...
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Paucal number without singular
I have usually seen the paucal number presented as intermediate between singular and plural in the languages that have it:
singular - just one
paucal - a few
plural - many
However, is there any ...
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