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Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

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

#101

Post by philwelch »

anitil wrote: post #94
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 (…

As a native speaker I refuse to say 'these data' or the word datum. I prefer 'this data' for plural and 'this piece of data' for singular. Yes I know its wrong in some sense, but I think that ship has sailed

I've also seen "data point" used when a singular form is required. I think in common usage, "data" is a mass noun like "mayonnaise" rather than a plural.

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

#102

Post by lobster_johnson »

yorwba wrote: post #95
lobster_johnson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point gender in most languages has almost nothing to do with the semantic meaning of the words themselves -- biological gender or whatever -- and we might as well call it something less culturally loaded like "noun class". A famous example is "das Mädchen" in German -- a masculine (edit: neuter, I mean!) noun for a biologically feminine person. Languages are littered with such inconsistencies, and as a langua…

"Das Mädchen" is actually neuter, because it's descended from the diminutive of "Magd" (English "maid"). It's the same for "das Jüngelchen", except that "der Junge" is much more common for boys. I don't think there's any case where German has a word of the opposite gender for a person whose gender is known, because it's usually easy to adapt the default (masculine) form by appending "-in".

I meant neuter! I studied German for three years in school, but my brain got its wires crossed there for a second.

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

#104

Post by justinpombrio »

The book The Unfolding of Language[1] describes the forces that shape how language evolves. One is extending the use of a pattern (e.g. "en" for plural), even in cases like this one where it wasn't technically appropriate. Another is the use of metaphor. E.g. "discover" used to mean "to remove the cover of", but now its meaning is purely metaphorical and the literal meaning has been mostly lost. Another is laziness: slurring long compound phrases together until they're effectively one word. A lot of conjugations/declentions are a result of this. I recommend this book if you're interested in how languages change over time; it's very well written.

EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, "wicked" used to mean "evil", but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it's started to mean "sweet".

And there's always the great consonant shift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Manki...

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

#105

Post by kazinator »

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"??

Grammatically plural nouns denoting single objects is something that occurs in multiple European languages (and perhaps others), not only English.

   English   French    Slovak
   pliers    pinces    kliešte
   pants     pantalons nohavice
   scissors  ciseaux   nožnice
All plural. The singular "kliešť" exists, but it refers to an insect: the tick. The word "nohavica" is used when referring to just one of the pant legs. (E.g. one being rolled up, getting wet, or being sewn differently, or other such contexts.)

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

#106

Post by kazinator »

philwelch wrote: post #101
anitil wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native speaker I refuse to say 'these data' or the word datum. I prefer 'this data' for plural and 'this piece of data' for singular. Yes I know its wrong in some sense, but I think that ship has sailed

I've also seen "data point" used when a singular form is required. I think in common usage, "data" is a mass noun like "mayonnaise" rather than a plural.

That's a good point! Because the compound noun rules in English normally call for all nouns, other than the head of the noun phrase, to be singular.

This applies to the singulars that denote single objects too: scissor lift, pant leg; not scissors lift or pants leg.

According to this principle, it should be datum point, where only the head noun point may be pluralized.

"Datum point" exists, but I've never seen or heard it in use; it's just a "confirm by Google".

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

#107

Post by Izkata »

asveikau wrote: post #98
gizmo686 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there an "e" at the end?

I'm reminded of how English orthography has that weird thing where the presence of a silent E can seemingly change the vowel in the previous syllable. For example the Tom Lehrer song, "who can turn a can into a cane? Silent E..." So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.

Or mistaken for niff. [0]

(No, I didn't know this word existed before this moment.)

[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/niff

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

#109

Post by anitil »

kazinator wrote: post #96
anitil wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native speaker I refuse to say 'these data' or the word datum. I prefer 'this data' for plural and 'this piece of data' for singular. Yes I know its wrong in some sense, but I think that ship has sailed

> that ship has sailed Wha? Oh, you mean quae navis navigaverunt .

Haha yes of course!

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

#110

Post by empath75 »

phamilton wrote: post #100
empath75 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re interested in that sort of minutia, there’s a History of English podcast that goes into it in mind numbing detail. The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse, and the -en plural is from the more complex system inherited from Anglo Saxon languages. English is like a creole or a pidgin language in a lot of ways and a lot of its features are due to various foreign invaders imposing their gramma…

> The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse Which is interesting, because modern Swedish has an -n plural (among other plurals) and no -s plural. Compare ögon (eyes) and öron (ears) with their old english eyen and earen. I guess it would follow that Swedish had a lot of Angle Saxon influence in its evolution.

It’s actually more that the Old Norse and Old English had different endings and the Vikings didn’t bother to figure out the English system. I don’t think they know whether the -s is from a Norse ending or whether the Norse settled on -s for other reasons.

The simplified version eventually spread because England was a mixture of various ethnicities for centuries and you’d have different variants of English from one town to the next— and after the Vikings you had the normans.

I think it’s the equivalent of the guy I was eating with at a restaurant in Nicaragua who yelled to the waitress ‘honey, el forko por favor?’ Like, there was an attempt at Spanish.

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