[blml] he, he/she, or they for whom the bell tolls

[Robert Geller]

Actually it works fine.
In English we say one player, two players, etc., but if
you think about it the "s" at the end of "two players" 
is superfluous.   Japanese just leaves out the redundant "s."

Once in a while Japanese speakers have to explicitly 
specify "one or more suits" or "two or more suits"
when discussing bridge but this isn't any big deal.

-Bob

Nakatani Tadayoshi writes:
>Hi,
>
>Steve Willner wrote:
>> But how in the world does the language work without singular and 
>> plural?!  Are there other languages like that?  (I admit I'm showing my 
>> lack of education here!)  You may have to use a lot of "one or more" in 
>> the translation unless not specifying a number implies that.
>
>In Japanese (in principle), you put one, two, or three etc. (we have 
>extensive different expressions depending on the subject, that is, 
>whether a word shows person, animal, plant, desk, notebook and so on) 
>just in front of a word, but each word has only one form, it dose not 
>change whether it is singular or plural.
>I hope you get some idea about singular and plural in Japanese. Bob 
>Geller could explain this in more clear English, I am sure.
>
>Nakatani Tadayoshi
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>blml mailing list
>blml at amsterdamned.org
>http://www.amsterdamned.org/mailman/listinfo/blml

-----------------------------------------------------
Robert (Bob) Geller,     Tokyo, Japan        geller at nifty.com