Fw: Grammatical features / gender power & prefix derivation

[Richard Wordingham]

(This was meant for the list.)

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 00:20:28 +0000
From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com>
To: Mark Davis ☕️ <mark at macchiato.com>
Subject: Re: Grammatical features / gender power & prefix derivation


On Tue, 2 Mar 2021 14:47:59 -0800
Mark Davis ☕️ <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:
> We appear to be talking past one another. We don't support "kilo" (as
> a separate term, or as an abbreviation for "kilogram" or other
> kilo-units), so your statement "when 'kilo' and 'kilogram' have
> different genders" is not relevant to CLDR currently. (It could be in
> the future, but I'd like to clearly distinguish current from future
> capabilities.)  

It is relevant as to when one cannot confidently assign a gender to the
abbreviation.  Whether CLDR supports the equivalent of "kilo" is
linguistically irrelevant.  At present I can believe you are only
interested in generating text using a correct gender.

> > I've been looking, but I've only turned up one example of the
> > Swahili plural form *vilogramu; the n-/n- noun classing of
> > _kilogramu_ 'kilogram' has very little competition.  The word
> > _gramu_ is in the n-/n- noun class.  

> That sounds useful, but I couldn't quite parse what you were saying.
> Do you mean that the word for gram is in the
> n-/n- noun class and the word for kilogram is not?  

The Swahili word for 'gram' is in the n-/n- noun class.  The long
Swahili word for 'kilogram' that I can consistently find is also in the
n-/n- class.  It seems likely that the usual word for
'kilogram' is _kilo_, which has the virtue of conforming to Swahili
phonology.  The word _kilo_ can reportedly be in either n-/n- noun
class or the ki-/vi- word class, thought the former seems to be
commoner.  When the long word for 'kilogram' is in the n-/n-
class, its plural is _kilogramu_.  If it be in the ki-/vi- class,
its plural is _vilogramu_.  I've found only one example of it, in the
sentence, "Kuna vilogramu 28 kwa gramu 100 za bidhaa", which Google
Translates translates as "There are 28 kilograms per 100 grams of
product". If the 'v' is not a typo, that sentence is a lovely example
of different noun classes for base and derived units.

By contrast, I get multiple hits on "kilogramu tatu" meaning '3 kg', so
for generating text one should accept the word for 'kilogram' as being
in the same noun class as the word for 'gram'.  (It's far from unknown
for Swahili words to be in multiple word classes with little or no
difference in meaning.)

Richard.