Norwegian have a lot of colloquialisms that must be handled if you want the
language to sound natural. The example with "kilo" exists in a lot of
languages in one form or another.
Then you have congruence on external factors (direction, length,
emptyness), missing plurals for some units (Norwegian mil is one example), …

On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 5:58 AM, Jan Macura <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi John, all
>
> 2016-07-29 15:54 GMT+02:00 John Erling Blad <[email protected]>:
>
>> In general this has more implications than simple singular/plural forms
>> of units. Agreement/concord/congruence is the proper term. In some
>> language you will even change the form given the distance to the thing you
>> are measuring or counting, even depending on the type of thing you are
>> measuring or counting, or change on the gender of the thing, and then even
>> only for some numbers.
>>
>
> Linguistic agreement is common in a lot of inflected languages [1].
>
> Now assume "kilogram" is changed to the short form "kilo", then it is "én
>> kilo" which is masculinum. The prefix "kilo" is only used for "kilogram",
>> so it isn't valid Norwegian til say "én kilo" when referring to "1 km", or
>> "én milli" when refering to "1 milligram".
>
>
> On the other hand, we don't have to deal with colloquialisms like "kilo"
> in your example. Modelling the formal language would be still hard enough.
>
> Best,
>  Jan
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language
>
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