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Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

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

#191

Post by dragonwriter »

kazinator wrote: post #105
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,…

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

None of those examples in English unambiguously denote single objects, they all denote indefinite numbered collections. The explicit singular object in each case is "a pair of X", where "X" is the term you have listed, and that is a grammatically singular noun phrase denoting a singular object.

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

#192

Post by jacobush »

jwilk wrote: post #178
TeMPOraL wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "'et', per-se 'and'" I'm having trouble parsing this. What was the meaning of this phrase?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ampersand has the following etymology for "ampersand": A mondegreen of "and per se and", meaning "and (the character) '&' by itself", which is how the symbol (&) was originally referred to in English. This formulation is due to the fact that in schools, when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "O" and, at one point, "&") was preceded…

In Swedish, "by itself" is "för sig" that is, quite literally, "per se". (ö and e in "per" pronounced the same, "sig" and "se" pronounced the same.)

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

#193

Post by rowaway93 »

toast0 wrote: post #29
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 (…

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.

dat- is the stem, I suppose, -um is a grammatical ending. Data simply suits the English ear better because it's close to the nominal suffix -er. How do you like this dater point?

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

#194

Post by rowaway93 »

yesenadam wrote: post #86
timthorn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the UK, Lego.

You mean "not in the US"? Im not sure exactly, but only have heard people in US saying "Legos". (Australia here, we play with Lego!)

Totally opaque to whether that's "lego's" or "legos" and children in general probably don't care for an overzealous syntactic classification of single morphemes either.

Is "gimme the lego over there" strange? I think it is, and if it is, then it's an interesting dater point to support this hypothesis.

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

#195

Post by nivexous »

afroboy wrote: post #182
stevula wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old English had [a plural ending in S]( https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Nouns#Strong_Nouns ) that predates Norman invasion. You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.

> but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary. Not always check Spanish for example they took a lot from Arabic, like 'EL'.

El does not come from Arabic.

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

#196

Post by kpil »

kpil wrote: post #167
drsim wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Well, the Danish are more relaxed about most things... Swedish is a bit more complex with arbitrary assigned neutral or uterum gender and definite articles. But you'd probably be understood using -er in spoken Swedish for a large group of words. Written Swedish is more tricky. https://medium.com/@mailmyswedish/plurals-in-swedish-76f1de9...

... I must say I have never really thought about the complex rules - I had to compare and I'd say Swedish is more complex than the other Nordic languages.

Although they kept the cases - that there are only traces of left in Swedish - even Icelandic seems simpler.

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

#197

Post by konart »

In Russian it's "ребёнок" (child) and "дети" (children). "Дети" is actually a plural form of now archaic "дитя" and used because... "ребёнок" does not have a plural form.

The funny thing here is that "ребёнок" while not being archic comes from an anchient-russian "робя", which has plural form "робята", which is actually used in modern language too, but meaning can be anything from "boys" to "guys" or any other generalisation of a group of young people (both boys and girls).

PS: at the same time you can actually invent a plural for "ребенок" if you want to, but it may be considered as something similar to cockney, but used on purpose in otherwise normal speech.

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

#198

Post by _ak »

afroboy wrote: post #182
stevula wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old English had [a plural ending in S]( https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Nouns#Strong_Nouns ) that predates Norman invasion. You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.

> but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary. Not always check Spanish for example they took a lot from Arabic, like 'EL'.

LOL, what? Spanish "el" is etymologically derived from Latin ille/illa/illud, which became el/la/lo in Spanish.

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

#199

Post by rowaway93 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #102
yorwba wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I have a hunch that the nominally feminine gender is rather one of subjunction, not to say subjugation. Der Himmel -> Die Sonne -> Das Wetter. Der Tag -> Die Nacht -> Das Jahr. Der Mond -> Die Sterne -> Das Pantheon ... OK, I am not quite sure, but at least gender was an innovation in Germanic, whereas the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European knew inflection for in-/animate -- e.g. there were two different words for fire, where the the other gave ignition [1].

It stands to reason that the feminin came to be at the boundary between these.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

PS: This is fun ... Der Mensch -> Die Familie -> Das Dorf. Der Krieger, die Krieger, das Kriegen. Der Aktionär -> die Aktie. Die Aktionärinnen ... das Aktienpaket. Der Karren (car), Die Karre (load), das Ankarren, das Herangekarrte, das Karree (See [2] for more on four wheels, strange animism, etc. Ultimately inconclusive).

Note that the pluralizing morpheme -en was written -in in old german. Also note that many case inflections come out as -en, so I suppose that female forms were in the objectified part of speech more often, where the gender is not reflected in the article (den Kindern, Männern, Frauen).

[2] http://langevo.blogspot.de/2014/09/four-map.html

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

#200

Post by philipps »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #119
justinpombrio wrote: post #104

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:…

I was amazed to discover that oranges used to be called "noranges" but "a norange" was corrupted into "an orange".

Could it be because “a norange” and “an orange” sound very similar?
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