Re: [tied] All of creation in Six and Seven

> > I don't know about PIE but for PSem the "standard eplanation" is
> > without (linguistic) evidence and contradicted by e.g Ar. baqarun
> > 'cow/cows (collective)' vs. baqaratun 'a cow'....
>
> This actually is the point (or should have been): The feminines are
> individuals singled out of a collective mass. The group is unmarked, but
> the remarkable attention drawn to a single item within it gets a
> morphological marking. The example you give will appear to illustrate this
> perfectly. Indo-European is not all that sophisticated, but simply uses
> the collective itself as an animate singular. However, the basic
> association looks the same.

Right! Ok. I think cross-liguistically we can expect that whichever form
is unmarked is also the most frequent (and the converse). This (in
pastoralist speech atleast) is just a special case.
all the best,
Harald