ABSTRACT
Here and there we find anomalies in the use of number-forms which are difficult to explain, but which at any rate show that people are not absolutely rational beings, thus in OE. the use of the singular with the tens, as in Beowulf 3042 se woos fiftigC8 fotgemearcC8 lang , it was 50 feet long,' ib. 379 pritigC8 manna mmgencrmft ' the strength of 30 men,' thus with some inconsistency, as fotgemearcC8 is sg. and manna is pl.-In Middle English we find the singular a before a numeral, a forty men, meaning' about forty,' thus very frequently in Dan. en tyve 8tykker ' about twenty (pieces),' and this may be compared with E. a few (in Jutland dialects am lile fo); the sg. article here turns the plural words from a quasi-negative quantity (he has few friends) into a positive (he has a few friends). But a few may have been induced by a many, where many may be the collective substantive and not the adjective-the forms of these, which were at first separated, have been confounded together. Fr. vers lC8 une heurC8 (as well as vers lC8 midi) with its numerical incongruity is evidently due to the analogy of other indications of time such as ver8 lC8 deux heurC8; it is as if ver8-le8 had become one amalgamated preposition with denominations of the hour. The G. interrogative pronoun wer, like E. who, abovp 198, is independent of number,
species, in cases in which words like all (all cats),l every (every cat) or any (any cat) are not used. For this notion Breal (M 394) coins the word" omnial " parallel to " dual, plural," and this would be a. legitimate grammatical term in a language that possessed a separate form for that' number.' But I do not know of any language that has such a. form; as a matter of fact, in order to express this notion of a whole class or species, languages sometimes use the singular and sometimes the plural; sometimes they have no article, sometimes the definite article, and sometimes the indefinite article. As there is in English no indefinite article in the plural, this gives five combinations, which are all of them represented, as seen in the following examples:
(1) The singular without any article. In English this is found only with man and tcoman (man is mortal I woman is best when she is at rest)-and with mass-words,· whether material or immaterial (blood is thicker than water I history is often stranger than fiction). In G. and Dan. it is used only with material mass-words, in Fr. not even with these. a
(2) The singular with the indefinite article: II cat is not as vigilant as a dog; the article may be considered as a. weaker any, or rather, one (" a. ") dog is taken as representative of the whole class.
