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Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

grammarphobia.com

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

#221

Post by dctoedt »

V-2 wrote: post #187
dctoedt wrote: post #184

It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent: + The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca. + For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as…

> It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent This is how languages evolve already. Mistakes become accepted over time. The problem with "turning it up to 11" (or not offering mistakes any resistance before giving in to them; being conservative about it helps t…

> As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty sure that widespread acceptance for spelling mistakes would pose more difficulty for me in the long run.

GP here. You and @maginary make an interesting point, namely that standardized spelling helps non-native speakers. The problem with English is that much of our existing standardized spelling is quite non-intuitive to pronounce, e.g., rough, through, thorough. Perhaps some kind of spelling reform as discussed by @philipps and @jherdman below would help, although other comments here also discuss the problems that have arisen with such efforts.

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

#222

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ekianjo wrote: post #67
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 (…

Media is another word that is not used consistently either. It is the plural of medium in latin but is not always understood as a plural.

Fewer people know Latin in Britain now. So the Latin derived words are usually used as fully adopted words target than being treated as quoted Latin. This seems right to me.

"Forums" (rather than fora) seems a little awkward to me, but "data point" seems more natural than "datum". But then I never learnt Latin at school. At some point we need to stop applying the grammar rules of foreign languages to fully adopted words.

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

#223

Post by brainwad »

elboru wrote: post #212
dctoedt wrote: post #184

It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent: + The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca. + For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as…

Can I make a wish? As a non-native speaker it would be great to have a consistent alphabet, it wouldn't matter the order of the letters, a letter would always correspond to a single sound, specially with vocals. If the Latin alphabet is not suitable for this then it would be great to have a new alphabet or maybe just the Latin one but with some letters added.

This is basically impossible for English, since for many vowels, the various dialects map the diaphonemes of English into mutually incompatible sets of phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... (and even that chart is underestimating the differences - tour and moor definitely have different phonemes in en-AU, even though they are allegedly from the same diaphoneme.

If you had a conservative spelling system, where each diaphoneme was mapped to a single letter, speakers of dialects with many merges (e.g. American English) would struggle to spell correctly, since they would be unable to distinguish several letters apart. If you had a simplified system, then most speakers would get confused by merges that existed in the spelling system but not in their own dialects; and speakers of more conservative dialects wouldn't be able to write sounds that are to them different.

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

#224

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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.

"Spectacles! Glasses are vessels from which one drinks."

-- my school teacher

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

#225

Post by dctoedt »

dctoedt wrote: post #184

It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent: + The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca. + For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as…

(It's too late to revise my original post:) By tolerating and collecting "mistakes" in English, I have in mind the same approach as waiting to lay some of the sidewalks on a new campus until it becomes clear where the actual traffic will be, as opposed to insisting that everyone walk only on the pre-planned sidewalks.

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

#226

Post by ekianjo »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #222
ekianjo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media is another word that is not used consistently either. It is the plural of medium in latin but is not always understood as a plural.

Fewer people know Latin in Britain now. So the Latin derived words are usually used as fully adopted words target than being treated as quoted Latin. This seems right to me. "Forums" (rather than fora ) seems a little awkward to me, but "data point" seems more natural than "datum". But then I never learnt Latin at school. At some point we need to stop applying the grammar rules of foreign languages to fully adopted w…

the point is that they were initially adopted specifically in this way in the dictionary in the first place. Ignorance and years of bad education took their toll.

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

#227

Post by IncRnd »

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'.

Why do you believe Spanish took "el" from Arabic?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/el#Spanish

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

#228

Post by linkmotif »

lmoml wrote: post #139
linkmotif wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would have to guess the Norsemen being referred to here at the people who came in the 800s and 900s, not the Normans who came later

OP seemed to be referring to Normans. The whole cow (English) -> beef (French) is a classic linguistic example to cite with regard to them.

Yes that makes more sense actually. But now I am still confused.

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

#229

Post by pasquinelli »

1maginary wrote: post #211
dctoedt wrote: post #184

It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent: + The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca. + For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as…

Aside from V-2 already commented on, I'd like to add that spelling mistakes such as > "it's" as a possessive are mostly native-speaker exclusive. Your/you're, there/their, etc. spelling mistakes you just don't see non native speakers make. This is because they're just that, spelling mistakes. So while native speakers know what they mean but it's just associated with a sound in their head, they just write out that sou…

another example is "would of" instead of "would've."

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

#230

Post by V-2 »

philipps wrote: post #208
dctoedt wrote: post #184

It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent: + The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca. + For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as…

German speaking countries went through an effort to reduce the most obvious spelling exceptions in 1996. It introduced new spelling for many existing words but also allowed the use of the previous spelling to continue (in effect creating the situation OP describes where different options are equally valid). I lived in Germany at the time and remember a lot of resistance and confusion after the changes went through. A…

Classic example of the "big redesign in the sky". Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
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