---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
>>Lithuanian _ketverì_ 'four each', and Old Church Slavic
_c^etverU_ against _c^etvorU_ 'id.'
Merely out of love for hairsplitting.
Lith. _ketverì_ belongs to the category of numerals (Lith. _daugìniai skai~tvardz^iai_, I know of no established English translation) used to count 1. pluralia tantum, eg. _
ke~tverios z^ìrkle:s_ 'four pairs of scissors' 2. pairs of uniform objects or objects naturally belonging together, eg. _ke~tverios pir~s^tine:s_ 'four pairs of gloves' 3. (I took the examples from a book -- such usage is beyond my language competence) groups of such objects of any size, eg. _z^vir~blis dvejùs vaikùs pe~ri_ 'sparrow hatches two (broods of) baby-birds (per year)', _ke~tverias bitès turé:jau_ 'I had four (colonies of) bees'. The 'four each' gloss would square well with a distributive numeral, while _ketverì_ looks more like a sui generis collective one. (Lithuanian has a separate category for collective numerals proper, though: _ke~tvertas_ 'a pack of four, all four, four of them'.)
The meaning(s) of the OCS word is less easy to spot. It occurs only twice in the OCS canon, both times in _Codex Suprasliensis_. The first occurrence, _c^etvory_ (N.pl.fem.), corresponds to a Greek passage where John Chrysostom explains us that there are, in total, four gospel parables about the Last Judgement (http://suprasliensis.obdurodon.org/pages/supr185v.html, lines 9-13). This would imply a collective numeral ('four objects either naturally belonging together or treated indiscriminately as a unit or uniform', which they are).
The second passage (allegedly by the same author, though some people say it's a spurious attribution) is about a fourfold compensation for a sheep (http://suprasliensis.obdurodon.org/pages/supr180v.html, lines 11-15), and we found an adverbial phrase _c^etvoro[N.A.sg.neutral] c^etvoricejoN_[I.sg.fem.] 'four times, in a fourfold manner' in the Slavic translation. Since _
c^etvorica_ is obviously a collective noun meaning 'a group of four', it seems it's _c^etvoro_ which is mainly responsible for the phrase's multiplicative meaning. So maybe it's used as a multiplicative numeral here after all.
Beyond the canon, SJS also cites one more text for this word, viz. a Slavic translation of Gregory the Great's Forty Gospel Homilies, extant in three manuscripts. The first two occurrences of the word, _c^etvIrami_[I.pl.fem.] (var. _c^etverami_) and _c^etvery_[A.pl.fem] (var. _c^etvIry_, so that each manuscript has both -e- and -I-forms) translate a mention of the four Gospels as a unit ("Cur ergo in abstinentia quadragenarius numerus custoditur, nisi quia virtus Decalogi per libros *quattuor* sancti Evangelii impletur?","Denarius etenim quater ductus in quadragenarium surgit, quia tunc Decalogi mandata perficimus cum profecto *quattuor* libros sancti Euangelii custodimus."). It looks like again we are dealing with a Slavic collective numeral. In the third passage Gregory concludes that he has finished dealing with (a group of) four issues in question ("*Quattuor* itaque propositionum expleta ratione, ad dona eiusdem Spiritus contemplanda transeamus."), which would yet again point to a collective numeral, but the wording of the Slavic text gives me the impression the translator failed to understand the original here producing a nearly meaningless text (_c^etvero[N.A.sg.neutral] z^e ispravlenii ispUlneno pravIdoju_), so who knows.
Again, it's not that easy to explain these collective and multiplicative usages if one starts from a distributive numeral.
Sergei