This reminds me of a joke I heard so long ago that unfortunately I can’t remember the detail. Some Russians stationed in a remote location needed to write back to Moscow to request some supplies. They wanted to ask for 7 fire tongs. After much deliberation, nobody was able to come up with the correct form of the word “семь щипцов? семь щипцы?". So the punchline is that they resorted to asking for “4 fire tongs and 3 fire tongs” because they were confident they knew it was 4 щипца.
The actual story may not have been about tongs - I’m just using that as an example. To be funny, it would have to be a word that could plausibly be difficult for native speakers to ask for seven of.
I’ll raise you Lithuanian, which has plural numbers. As in, the numerals themselves have plural forms. These are used with objects such as scissors that are plural, but also with years. Three apples is trys obuoliai but three years is treji metai.
There’s an English version where a zookeeper has to order two new specimens for the mongoose exhibit. He ends up requesting “a mongoose and another mongoose.”
I guess the point in this case is that with pluralia tantum you have to use collective numerals, not regular cardinals. Or something… but wouldn’t native speakers know all that? In English you would know to ask for pairs of tongs, plus not to refer to a “tong”.
I don’t think so, and that’s my fault for choosing an example where that could have been the reason. The story could have been about shovels - семь лопаты? семь лопат? семь лопаток?. The English version of the story about the mongoose is exactly parallel - it hinges on the native speakers not being sure what the correct plural form of a particular word is, because it’s in some way unusual.
Yes, I didn’t explain it correctly because I don’t know the right terminology. It’s not that the number can be pluralised, like “nine threes” or “three nines”, although that is also true. What’s unique in Lithuanian is that there is a complete separate set of numbers used for certain words like pants and tongs.
