Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

grammarphobia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 247 posts

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#21

Post by Sharlin »

amaccuish wrote: post #3

This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n. So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men (Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "…

No, those words are ancient, much older than any remotely modern German. They come from Proto-Germanic via Old English and have cognates in most Germanic languages. Kin words are usually among the most preserved and most rarely borrowed words in a language, as are words related to agriculture and animal husbandry.

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#22

Post by amaccuish »

Sharlin wrote: post #21
amaccuish wrote: post #3

This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n. So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men (Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "…

No, those words are ancient, much older than any remotely modern German. They come from Proto-Germanic via Old English and have cognates in most Germanic languages. Kin words are usually among the most preserved and most rarely borrowed words in a language, as are words related to agriculture and animal husbandry.

Yes, very true, that's even further back, but you miss out on the fun stuff like vowel mutations and changing in endings :)

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#23

Post by gizmo686 »

csours wrote: post #6
Aardwolf wrote: post #2

Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar parts. Most objects are made of multiple parts though and they get a singular name just fine. That and the "double u", why not "we"??

For the sake of being a contrarian, there are two pieces of "glass" in a glasses. I do wonder if simpler english will ever catch on I do wondr if simplr nglsh wil evr cach on.

Doubtful.

Also, I think your "simpler" transcription is actually less phonologically accurate.

For instance, I would transcribe the "er" in "wonder" as [ɝ]. In some dialects, it would actually just be [ɜ] without any pronounced trace of the "r" like sound. In actuallity, I suspect that it is actually [ɜɹ] underlying, and the two sounds just coalesce into [ɝ] when you pronounce them.

That is to say, the "er" sound is viewed a variant of the vowel moreso than it is a variant of "r". I have the same complaint about "simplr" and "evr".

For "nglsh", I just do not see any motivation to remove the vowels. It is true that English allows "n" to act as a vowel, but in "English", there is a pretty clear [I] (as in Igloo) before the [n]. Similarly, [l] could act as a vowel, but there is also a pretty clear [I] following it.

Finally for "cach", I can't really complain about this being worse, as "ch" is our way of writing tsh ( /t͡ʃ/ ), but if we are simplifying English, it would be nice to clean up this too and show the relationship between that sound and the t sound.

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#24

Post by amaccuish »

madez wrote: post #20
amaccuish wrote: post #3

This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n. So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men (Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "…

> all are caused my german. It's not like German were "at fault". English grew out of a common ancestor with nowadays German.

Sorry, poor english :) and yes that's true, but that common ancestor, west germanic, is they key point here, as it shows us why things are in English.

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#25

Post by [deleted] »

amaccuish wrote: post #3

This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n. So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men (Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "…

[deleted]

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#26

Post by politelemon »

1ris wrote: post #17

"childs" is, and always was uncommon, but seems to exists. Also saw it source code written by non-native speakers. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Children%2C+Ch...

Appears even less - looking at the results, those slight bumps correspond to authors named Child, rather than its usage as plural.

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#27

Post by pluma »

jMyles wrote: post #13
weinzierl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can live with "glasses", "pants", "pliers" and "scissors", but "data" drives me crazy because even native speakers seem to be completely inconsistent when it comes to its number. EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas (plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data, it's Visum (…

"People" too - as inconsistently numbered as data.

That one is actually because it's two different words:

"people" is the plural form of "person", i.e. one person, two people, as a group

"people" (pl. "peoples") is a group of people as a unit, e.g. a tribe or an ethnic group or the citizens of a country

"persons" is ALSO the plural of "person" but only used when you talk about individuals rather than a group (e.g. "person of interest" -> "persons of interest", not "people of interest")

Yes this is a bit awkward and yes sometimes what's grammatically possible still sounds awkward even to native speakers (e.g. I'd argue "the polices" is a legitimate term when discussing multiple police organisations of a country as an abstract group but it sounds extremely wrong to most people apparently).

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#28

Post by aldo712 »

amaccuish wrote: post #3

This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n. So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men (Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "…

So, are German men also called "Germen"? xD

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#29

Post by toast0 »

weinzierl wrote: post #11
Aardwolf wrote: post #2

Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar parts. Most objects are made of multiple parts though and they get a singular name just fine. That and the "double u", why not "we"??

I can live with "glasses", "pants", "pliers" and "scissors", but "data" drives me crazy because even native speakers seem to be completely inconsistent when it comes to its number. EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas (plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data, it's Visum (…

Data is a plural of datum, if you're considering the individual pieces, but it's more commonly used (in my experience as a US native) as a collection singular like sand. Ex the sand has formed a hill, the data has filled the hard drive.

Re: Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

#30

Post by amaccuish »

gizmo686 wrote: post #12
amaccuish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other languages, there is a number (dual) that deals with cases like this. It's been dropping from most languages where it's used. In Russian it's mostly gone, but alot of the endings remain. Also lot's of languages when borrowing from English do away with the plural if it's obvious. Like in french, a pair of jeans is just un jean, singular.

Dual doesn't really help in this case. In a dual system, we would have something like: 1 pant 2 pantx 3+ pants The problem with the words op is describing is that they should, semantically, belong to the category of 1 object, but morphologically (and syntactically) belong to the category of not-1 object. Adding a separate category for 2 objects does not address this.

Got you, sorry misread :) though I guess the french have it right with un jean :)
Post reply on HN