In English, “The houses of my friends”* could mean:
As many houses as friends (one house per friend).
Fewer houses than friends (friends are arranged into groups and each group has one house).
More houses than friends (each friend owns more than one house).
More houses than friends (some friends own more than one house).
More houses than friends (friends are arranged into groups and each group has more than one house).
More houses than friends (friends are arranged into groups and some groups have more than one house.
As many houses as friends (friends are arranged into groups and each group owns more than one house).
As many houses as friend (friends are arranged into groups and some groups own more than one house).
Fewer houses than friends (friends are arranged into groups and each group owns more than one house).
Fewer houses than friends (friends are arranged into groups and some groups own more than one house).
...I think that’s all the possibilities.
To make things less ambiguous, I propose a kind of “plural layering”. It might work something like
“The houseses of my friends.” (bolded for ease of reading (’cause “house” ends in “se”, which might look like “ses” if it was plural, which it is) means that each friend has more than one house.
And then you could say “The roomseses of the houseses of my friends”, which would mean that each friend has more than one house and each house has more than one room.
And then you could say “The wallseseses of the roomseses of the houseses of my friends“, which would mean that each friend has more than one house, which each has more than one room, which each has more than one wall.
Or you could say “The wallses of the roomses of the houses of my friends“, which would mean that each friend has one house, and each house has more than one room, and each room has one wall (so I guess each room would be circular, or something).
And I guess you could say “The walls of the roomses of the houses of my friends“, which might mean that each friend has one house, and each house has multiple rooms, but each room is arranged into groups, and each group of rooms has one wall. That example doesn’t work so well with friends/houses/rooms/walls, but if you think about the examples in bullet points at the top, you might be able to get what I mean.
It’s worth noting that at extremes, like “The layerseseseses of paint on the wallseseses of the roomseses of the houseses of my friends“ are a bit unweildy to say, and the listener would have to be paying close attention to the numbers of plurals (heh) to take advantage of plural layering, so maybe something like “Bristles5s from the paintbrushes4s in the layers5s of paint on the walls4s of the rooms3s of the houseses of my friends“ but I don’t like that because it kind of implies as many bristles as layers. So maybe actually “Bristlesup5down1up1s of the paintbrushesup5down1s in the layersup5s of paint on the wallsup4s of the roomsup3s of the houseses of my friends“ or something. And you might want to use Greek or something instead of English.
*I didn’t want to use the possessive “s” in this post, because it could cause confusion (as the whole thing is about plurals)
I was inspired to make this post after my brother told me about an example sentence that was used for him when he was learning Esperanto on Duolingo, which was something along the lines of “la vestajxoj de la bestoj”, which means “The cothes of the animals”, but “vestajxo” is “clothes”, so “vestajxoj” would be “clotheses“, which implies more than one article of clothing per animal. It’s probably just one of the creators of the course getting mixed up about uncountable vs countable nouns or something (but maybe not!).
All of those “s”s remind me of “tmesiseseseises”. I should make a post about “tmesiseseseises”.
