Riddle: How Many Plums Were on the Tree?

[K.J.Healey]

Healey, your approach is reasonable if you interpret "he had not eyes" as "he did not have a plural number of eyes." My point which I have explained before is that in English, "he had not eyes" means "he did not have any eyes," or "he had zero eyes."

Incidentally, if you take the literal "non-plural" meaning, "he had not eyes" means "he did not have a plural number of eyes and he did not have zero eyes," since "zero eyes" is a plural number of eyes. So "he had not eyes" means "he had one eye" according to your logic, which is nonsense; if I say "I had not sunglasses" it does not mean I had exactly one "sunglass."

Are you an English major? When you say "in English, "he had not eyes" means "he did not have any eyes" I see that as a mistake. Positive/negative structure in english is very much like mathematics, and when simplifying a statement you need to consider both the context and the properties of the base word provided. You can correctly say that "he had not" means exactly "he didnt have" but you cannot say that "eyes" means "any eyes". So if I say "I have eyes" does that mean I say "I have any eyes"? No. It means I have a plural of eye.

Also sunglasses has completely different word properties than eyes, becasue the singular for what we consider a set of sunglasses is plural because we shorten "a set/pair of sunglasses" to "sunglasses". So it is still singular of the word "pair".

 

[Bartholomew]

From dictionary.com, "any" (the relevant definition) means "One, some, every, or all without specification." So "eyes" does mean "any eyes." What would you say "any eyes" means?

I'm not sure why it doesn't sound right to say "I have any eyes." Probably that has something to do with grammar rather than the simple meaning of "any."

Okay, replace "sunglasses" with "motorcycles." If I say, "I did not have motorcycles," by the literal meaning, it says, "I did not have 0 or 2 or more motorcycles," so it says, "I had exactly 1 motorcycle," in contradiction to the common sense interpretation of it.

 

[K.J.Healey]

See I see "I did not have motorcycles" to mean I had one motorcycle. Thats my common sense interpertation.

When you talk about "any" and "eyes" and say "eyes does mean "any eyes"" I don't see where you get that. I used dictionary.com too and it says :

PLURAL : # Grammar. Of or being a grammatical form that designates more than one of the things specified.

More than one. So "eyes" is the plural of "eye". There can be no disputing that. That means that there must be "more than one of" eye. If you do not have "more than one of" you have "one or zero of" when talking about positive quantities.

The only argument that slows us down is that "eye" is a tricky word like sunglasses.
If you didnt have any eyes, you would say "I do not have eyes." right? While if you didnt have any bottles of water you would say "I do not have a bottle of water." The way we describe a quantity of certain objects differs and creates problems like these.

I say we just agree that the English language is really messed up.

 

[Bartholomew]

All right, so "plural" was not what I meant. I meant, "of the form 'eyes.''" Zero eyes is of the form "eyes" in this sense. If you say, "he had not eyes," it means, absolutely literally, that he had nothing that can be spoken of as "eyes." "Zero eyes" literally can be spoken of as "eyes," as can "two eyes," or "three eyes," etc.

Anyway, my point is not about the idiosyncracies of interpreting "eyes" literally. My point is about how in the English language, "eyes" means "any eyes" which means "at least one eye." The word "any" means without specification; simply stressing that there are some. "He did not have eyes at all" is equivalent, and again it means, "he had zero eyes."