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Not even old languages, in many languages today (notably slavic) nouns decline differently with "1", "2", "3", "4" and say "5".

Hence a wonderful piece of Soviet humour: A factory needs 5 fireplace pokers, but none of the workers knows the correct plural form for 5 fireplace pokers; not wanting to appear ignorant when they send their request to management, they request "3 fireplace pokers and 2 more". Some months later they receive the fireplace pokers with a note saying "here are 4 fireplace pokers and 1 more" -- because management didn't know the word either!



that's a tough one!

i'm a native russian speaker (though i have been living in an english-speaking country for a while), yet it took me a few moments, and i compulsively consulted wiktionary to check myself:

"five fireplace-pokers" would be "пять кочерёг", marked as 'irregular' in the table.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/кочерга#Declension




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