Should «huaq» really be distributive?

[acotis]

This prevents saying things like hủaq chẻo pảı X Y.

[robintown]

It does not prevent it at all. For example, "the ones on the right are friends with each other more than the ones on the left are":

hủaq chẻo pảı lú mẻ hóa síaq lú mẻ hóa lío da

You simply manually singularize sỉaq and lỉo with mẻ to obtain the correct reading.

If hủaq were collective, common things like "I am better than you" would become very awkward, which is why distributivity should be the default.

[robintown]

Actually I take that back, you are totally right. And this applies generally to all words with a property in their definition.

And even things like "I am better than you" would still work as intended with collective places since the inner property, gỉ, still distributes over them. Making the outer predicate collective just means that it doesn't interfere with the structure of the object that it passes to the inner predicate.

[xorxes]

"I am heavier than you two" could have either a distributive interpretation ("I am heavier than each of you two") or a collective interpretation ("I am heavier than you two together"), so I don't think it is totally clearcut which should be default.

[robintown]

@xorxes That specific example can already be translated correctly with a mereological sum via mẻ.