cadmium136 | Re: La singular o la plural con zero?

• Autor: cadmium136
• Tema: Re: La singular o la plural con zero?
• Data: 2011-07-31 14:39
• Mesaje: 3380 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

Thanks Simon for the info.  I have had LFN added to Launchpad and by default zero is plural.  Now I have to create a translation team for it.  I'll post a message when it's done.
Cheers,
cadmium

--- In LinguaFrancaNova@yahoogroups.com, "Simon Davies" <simon.franova@...> wrote:
>
> I agree with George that both the singular and plural are
> acceptable after "zero" and "no", but I think there's a
> subtle difference in emphasis.
>
> Consider:
>
> (a) Tu ave zero mesajes.
>
> (b) Tu ave zero mesaje.
>
> Sentence (b) strikes me as being more emphatically negative
> than sentence (a). "Zero mesaje" suggests "no an un mesaje"
> (not even one message), whereas "zero mesajes" feels like a
> more neutral answer to the question "cuanto mesajes me ave?"
>
> Note that we say "cuanto mesajes" and not "cuanto mesaje".
> This suggests that the plural is the default in expressions
> of quantity for countable objects.
>
> With uncountable nouns (typically names of substances), the
> plural is never used. So for a word like "mone" the only
> possibilities are "cuanto mone me ave?" and "tu ave zero mone".
>
> Nonetheless, a lot of uncountable nouns can do double duty and
> be used in a countable sense (denoting individual "pieces" of
> a substance) as in "du cafes, per favore". There's then a
> useful distinction to be had between "zero cafe" (no coffee,
> no quantity of the substance called coffee) and "zero cafes"
> (no coffees, no individual cups or servings of coffee).
>
> Simon
>