151–160 of 247 posts
So how about the plurals of some words ending with "us", like fungus-fungi, but virus-viruses-not-virii and how about dingus-dingii-or-dinguses, doofus-doofii-or-doofuses and so forth?
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,…
And weirdly the Czech for "pliers" isn't the same as "ticks":
Slovak Czech
kliešte kleště
kliešť klíště
kliešte klíšťata
Ma cowkin made ma een waater
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And in the UK, Lego.
Lego is the brand name; "let's play with Lego" is short for "let's play with the Lego bricks". I think it's much closer to a group noun :) See also: Meccano, Duplo, Brio, Scalextric.
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Yes, which is why the & character is supposedly called the "empersand" in Scotland, for "'et', per-se 'and'".
> "'et', per-se 'and'" I'm having trouble parsing this. What was the meaning of this phrase?
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You mean Normans, not Norsemen.
Must do, actual Old Norse is similar to Old English and have similar plural endings and a generally similar grammar. Many irregular verbs share a common ancestor and are similar even today. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian have kept more of the insanely complex rules for pluralisation actually.
Danish isn't insanely complex to pluralise (native English speaker who recently learned Danish).
The choice is either add -e or -er with some exceptions.
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6279406/Plural-Endings-in-D...
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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.
In some contexts the plural of datum is datums, making it a bit more complicated than just a collective noun.
Which contexts did you have in mind?
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The historical use of u and v can be seen in the Lord's Prayer from 1538: > Our father whiche art in heuen, > halowed be thy name. > Let thy kyngdome cum vnto vs. > Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe, > as it is in heuen. In the first line we see how U was used within words for both U and V ('our' and 'heaven'). In the third line we see how V was used for words starting with U (as well as words starting with V).…
Yeah, compared to my contrived example, U and V were usually differentiated for typographical reasons and not perfectly interchangeable (kind of like the S and the "long S" that looks like a lowercase "f", e.g. in the phrase "Congrefs of the United States" in the original Bill of Rights). Another weird gray area between ligature and letter are the "æ" and "œ" characters, which are mainly used as ligatures for the Bri…
In Dutch, child/children is kind/kinderen, which is the same double plural. We also have that construction with ei/eieren for egg/eggs. (Regular plural suffixes are -en and -s.)
In the chicken post, which they link to in the article in question, it says: "The OED notes versions in such Germanic languages as Dutch (kieken, kuiken)..." But chicken is kip in Dutch. Maybe they're talking about older versions of the word. Also interesting, perhaps, is the other '-en' that comes to mind: boy/boys, which is jongen/jongens
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I was amazed to discover that oranges used to be called "noranges" but "a norange" was corrupted into "an orange".
And "an ewt" became "a newt", so it goes both ways.
I read up on this (rebracketing it's called), and now I understand why the snakes called Natter in German are adders in English, and that even made it back to German as ...otter (Kreuzotter for example).