Interesting, Romanian has some kind of neuter structure:
Romanian nouns are categorized into three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The neuter behaves like the masculine in the singular and the feminine in the plural; unlike the neuter in Latin which had distinct forms.
The similar thing is true for a number of Italian words. Il uovo ‘egg’ - le uove ‘eggs’. Similarly, a number of masculine words have a second plural ending in -a. Il braccio - i bracci ‘arms’/la braccia ‘the set of arms’. I’m sure @Lys can help us here.
I know this from Rumantsch, where the a-plural is a collective. Il bös-ch [bœʃt͡ɕ] ‘tree’ - la bos-cha ‘trees’; il daint ‘tooth’ - la dainta ‘set of teeth’; il piz ‘peak’ - la pizza ‘mountain range’; il crap ‘stone’ - la crappa ‘stones laying around’.
NB: See how boscum umlauts the o > ö in front of syllables with u, but bosca keeps the o? This used to be everywhere, but the modern variant of this Rumantsch (Vallader) regularized these forms. Earlier chüerp - corps ‘body - bodies’ > Modern corp - corps; öv - ovs > ov - ovs ‘eggs’ (from proto-Rumantsch/late-Vulgarlatin corpus - corpes, ovum - oves). However, Romonsch Sursilvan, 20 km to the west still has tgierp - corps, iev - ovs unrounding the vowel in the singular.
Yes, we have some words with gender swap between singular and plural.
L’uovo (m) is one egg.
Le uova (f) (with an uncommon plural ending in “a”) is many eggs.
Same with arms but with a twist. 
Il braccio (m) is one arm of whatever kind.
Le braccia (f) are human arms.
I bracci (m) is for other arms (eg mechanical arms)
Il dito (m) is one finger
Le dita (f) is for many fingers as a whole (all fingers of a hand)
I diti (m) is for many distinct fingers
I don’t know where that came from.
But AFAIrecall, neutral Latin words ending in -um had plural ending in -a.
Digitum (finger), digita (fingers)
That could look like a false feminine form.
It could be that vulgar latin transposed them to female.
Wrong example since digitus is masculine. 
I studied latin SOOOO long ago!
Bellum (war) is neutral and it’s plural is bella.
Yeah, but when gender distinctions crumble around you together with your Empire, it’s not far-fetched to assimilate digitus to other body part in neuter.
We do have a few words in English that exist only in plural form, all in the same context: clothes, trousers, and underpants. You’re also more likely to hear furs and skins, probably, in the context of clothing than their singular forums.
We also have words that verge on “redundant plurality”, like seas, skies, waters, snows; but these are poetic forms. And, of course, there are words with identical singular and plural forms like fish and sheep, which often include Japanese loanwords like samurai, which don’t pluralise in their native language.
There’s also data, which is actually the plural of datum, but many (perhaps most) people don’t know datum. But then, these same people often then treat data as a singular, which defeats the point of the example.
Here’s an idea to add some classical flavour to a game of Go.
Divide up the board into a 7x7 square around tengen, a 6x6 square in each corner, and 6x7 rectangles on each side. Each rectangle is named after a region, and the hoshi in it is regarded as its capital city.
The central square is, of course, Italia and its capital Roma.
NE: Scythia, capital Tyras
E: Graecia, capital Athenae
SE: Aegyptus, capital Alexandria
S: Libya, capital Carthago
SW: Mauretania, capital Lixus
W: Hispania, capital Tarraco
NW: Britannia, capital Londinium
N: Gallia, capital Lutetia
Ackchually, The capital of Gaul under Roman rule was Lugdunum (Lyon). But Gaul was, as everybody knows, divided in parts threes.
Not by heart, and I would need to know what these words mean in English, lemme check.
A lúcus, -í is a spot in a forest which is clear of trees, but also a sacred grove.
nemus, -oris is a forest in respect to its usance by livestock, as opposed by silva -ae which is used in respect to its use as source of timber.
Both these words are used by poets for woods and forests of any kind and sacred groves. But lucus is related to lux, so here’s your clearing.
Thanks! Much appreciated!
According to Ethnologue there are around 7,100 languages in the world. Human population right now is about 7.8 billion.
That means the average language has about 1.1 million speakers. This is more than Walloon (~600,000), Picard (~700,000), and Basque (~800,000); and less than Sardinian (~1,400,000). It’s close to the ~1,000,000 native speakers of Welsh. Paradoxically, we would tend to consider a language with average speakership to be a minor language.
3.2 billion people at the last count speak an Indo-European language, therefore 4.6 billion don’t. Ethnologue, again, cites 445 living I-E languages, therefore about 6,700 non-I-E languages. That means the average speakership of a non-I-E language is only about 700,000 people.
Now, what if we also take Sino-Tibetan (“Chinese”) languages out of the mix? They have about 1.3 billion speakers and, again, around 400 languages. So our “rump group”, which we can call the “Global Background Language Diversity”, is about 6,300 languages and 3.3 billion people, a population I suppose is largely in Africa and South-East Asia. The average “background” language has ~500,000 speakers.
there are many nearly dead languages
each language may have dialects, even speakers may not know which one they speak
there are sign language, Braille tactile, … of each
according to Nationalencyklopedin 2007:
top 100 languages by estimated number of native speakers
85% of world population speak it
but top 100 popular have 56,9 million - average
and 7000 of other have 143 571 - average
(using 2007 number of population)
Really, my whole idea of using the mean in the first place was a constraint of what data I could get my hands on. If we had enough information, we’d use the median and get a much more meaningful result.
I was thinking a bit after talking about butter chicken in the Dining Hall thread, wondering about the ways in which one could name it in Latin.
Probably the most natural way is gallína bútýrórum, using the genitive.
But you could also say gallína et bútýrum (chicken and butter) or gallína cum bútýrum (chicken with butter); gallína in bútýrís (chicken in butter), or even bútýrum in gallínís (butter on chicken).
If the cup is on the table in a Latin sentence, the table takes the ablative, right? Or is that only the bag in the cup is the bag?
Been a while since we last had a picture exercise, eh?
ouum, -a
sturnus, -i
accipiter, -tres / falco, -ones
cygnus, -i
phoenicopterus, -i
cerasum, -a
uua, -ae
pirum, -a
arbutum, -a
melo, -onis
margarita, -ae / baca, -ae
coralium, -a
caris, -ides / squilla, -ae
cancer, -cri
anguilla, -ae
fungus, -i
filix, -icis
flos, -ores
stoechas, -ades
arbor, -ores
serpens, -entes
batia, -ae
ursus, -i
Okay, top row:
切手, 切手, 切手, 切手, 切手,
second row:
切手, 切手, 切手, 切手, 切手,
third row:
切手, 切手, 切手, 切手, 切手,
fourth row:
切手, 切手, 切手, 切手, 切手,
Bottom row:
切手, 切手, 切手.
A Chicken of Butters? No.
Better! But butter is rather uncountable, so use the singular butyro.
in always takes the ablative if it gives a stable location and the accusative if it gives the direction of a movement.
That is so very interesting. What does 切 generally mean in Japanese? Looking at it without knowing it’s Japanese, it looks like cut your hands, cut your hands, cut your hands, cut your hands.
Yup, that’s how it’s read in Japan as well. I looked up the etymology.
切手 is an abbreviation of 切符手形
切符 on its turn means ticket, e.g. as in an bus ticket. 符 in itself is a token, and old-time tickets were tokens that would be punched by a machine, or indeed cut (切り).
手形 literally means handprint, but actually means a cheque or bill, since apparently in old times official documents would sometimes be identified by handprint.
Apparently 切手 is also used in Taiwanese Chinese to mean postage stamp
An unrelated but other word that you might find even funnier is that 手紙 means letter (as in what you put your 切手 on): literally meaning hand paper, it originally was meant for the kind of paper used for wrapping, doodling, etc., but nowadays just means letter.
Meanwhile in China it’s what you’d expect: toilet paper.
