In Basque when you say "five euros" you do not add the plural morpheme to the noun which follows the number, thus you say "bost euroØ" (i.e. five euro). In questions when you are asking the quantity, you do not need any plural marking either, e.g. "Zenbat etxeØ dago?" (i.e. "How many apple?"). I would like to know what languages share the same characteristics with Basque.
Many languages do not use a plural form in nouns (or verbs etc) if there is a numeral present. An example is Quechua.
Most of the Oceanian languages do not have grammatical number (and no grammatical gender). In drehu (Loyalty, New Caledonia), for instance:
La nekönatr la itre nekönatr
"the Ø child" the pl. child = the children
Enrique, I don't know much about Quechua, only the variant Quichua spoken in Ecuador. The lack of plural suffix when a number precedes the noun is true there too. By the way, do you have a feeling that if a linguist (one who believes there is a proto-Altaic language) saw the way Quechua/Quichua works without knowing it is in South America, he/she would say, oh my, this language is Altaic! ?
Bob,
That is certainly true for the Bantu and at least some of the other Niger-Congo languages. Everything is hignly cross-referenced...
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