2558: paul Dec 14, 2021
The name 'Paul' is found around the New Testament, though it is not from Greek. Indeed, the apostle who bore the name was himself born 'Saul' (שאול) but in Latin 'Paulus', literally 'small', was used to distinguish people with the same name, not so unlike 'junior'. Later, the connotations to 'small' took on the sense of 'humble'. This in turn took on religious connotations, and 'Paul' gained popularity thereafter.
2188: Paucal, Trial, and Greater Plurals Dec 11, 2020
In addition to the dual number, another number besides simply singular and plural is the paucal, which crops up in a number of different languages such as many Oceanic languages, Serbo-Croatian, some Cushitic languages, and Hopi. This is used specifically for a small but unspecified number; in English one would have to use other words like ‘a few’ rather than using morphology. In other languages too there is the trial, used for specifically three objects. There are however, some languages that rather than distinguishing between small numbers distinguish between greater ones. The greater plural—though all grammatical numbers are equally good ☺—is a syntactic category of some languages including Mele-Fila, a Polynesian language, that distinguishes large quantities, relative how much would be expected. This does allow some room for subjective understanding how much is 'a lot' for a given word, but for instance it might be used when discussing thousands of flowers in a park, or just a handful of luxury cars all together. Of course, this distinguishes from the paucal which is just as subjective. Moreover, Mele-Fila and these other languages with a greater plural will generally still use the plural for exact numbers. It should be noted that while this is a general overview, each language will treat these differently, such as Sursurunga which has a ‘lesser-plural’ in its pronoun system, once thought to be a trial number, but actually it can refer to either 3 or 4 people. Indeed Sursurunga has some of the most complicated numerical system for its grammar, distinguishing between singular, dual, (aforementioned) paucal, greater paucal, and plural.
