81–90 of 247 posts
Because some dude or gal somewhere some time ago thought it would be funny that generations to come would need to learn irregular forms of some random words! Why would grammar rules apply all the same to all the words, not that logical is it? /s
Edit: Ah, no. It's from the Angles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
Huh... I wonder if the the "eng" from England and English related to the Middle English englen and Old English englas for "angels"? Is England the land of angels? Edit: Ah, no. It's from the Angles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I#Famous_quotes_a...
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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.
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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…
Something that HN readers often don't understand is that being an engineer or having advanced understanding of a field does not equate having an understanding of linguistics, despite being a native speaker of a language. Merely striking out letters from words doesn't make a language or its spelling any simpler...
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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.
And in the UK, Lego.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7REAOG1kc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cZR1EXGapc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kg63k5JDH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqlVl0K9tw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVH6LdoEDNs
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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 (…
In Australia, is the singular of darta "dartum"? (Genuine question for any Aussies)
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Something that HN readers often don't understand is that being an engineer or having advanced understanding of a field does not equate having an understanding of linguistics, despite being a native speaker of a language. Merely striking out letters from words doesn't make a language or its spelling any simpler...
Not sure if that is directed at me, but I did minor in linguistics.
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"??
A lot less strange that intimate objects having a gender as you do a French and many other languages