Kun ihmiskunta lopulta lakkaa olemasta, 200 vuoden jälkeen ilmakuvasta ei voi nähdä sen edes koskaan olleen olemassa. Tämä on lohdullista.
Not to be the guy who always rambles about his own language in response to your posts, but: Finnish has two plurals, one for a definite amount and one for a not clearly defined amount. So, for example:
Kymmenen saunaa = ten saunas
Kymmeniä saunoja = tens of saunas
A useless fact, but English did, a long time ago, have three types of number: singular, dual, and plural—or, at least, the fossilised dual persisted in pronouns like wit ('we two'), git ('you two') and incer ('yours-but-there-are-two-of-you').
IIRC, Proto-Indo-European had dual number but a lot of the relevant grammatical architecture for nouns and verbs had already atrophied when English split off from its ancestor languages.
do you know which languages have separate 4 plurals or which ones have every number ending in "1" being singular? i knew about the trial and paucal beforehand but not these and i'd like to know more
Finnish presents an interesting corner case – it has singular and plural quite like English, but you do not use the plural number if you explicitly specify an amount
For example, let's consider a file download UI. You want to translate into Finnish the message "File Downloaded" / "Files Downloaded", which become "Tiedosto ladattu" / "Tiedostot ladattu". In both of these cases, tiedosto 'file' is in the nominative, in the former in the singular and in the latter in the plural.
If you then add a number to the UI, you can keep the one-file case as-is using nominative singular, "1 tiedosto ladattu", but the non-one-file case needs to become "5 tiedostoa ladattu", using the accusative singular
