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Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)

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

#241

Post by carlmr »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #219
carlmr wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was ewt pronounce yoot like newt being pronounced nyoot? Then at leas in modern English it would have been "a ewt" to begin with and no n for confustion. 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).

So, is naming of the natterjack toad related to adders? Do they wear "adder jack[ets]"? The skin patterning is not completely dissimilar.

Makes sense.

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

#242

Post by V-2 »

pasquinelli wrote: post #229
1maginary wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Or "except" where "accept" was meant

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

#243

Post by andrewshadura »

unhammer wrote: post #155
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?

"The last four letters of the alphabet are ecks, why, zee and 'and' as-one/by itself"

You probably meant zed.

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

#244

Post by toast0 »

mrec wrote: post #84
toast0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't heard the term "collection singular" before; I'd call that a mass noun or non-count noun. (Which I agree "data" has become.)

Mass noun is indeed the proper term, which I'll try to remember in the future. :)

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

#245

Post by Anthony-G »

amaccuish wrote: post #3

This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n. So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men (Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "…

When I was growing up in rural Ireland in the 80s, it was quite common to hear childer used as the plural for child so it was interesting to read in the submitted article that this usage dates from Middle English. Some of my parents’ generation used this word but it was mostly spoken by my grandparents’ generation. Its usage seems to have mostly died out in the decades since then and I haven’t heard it spoken in years. On a related note, the word chisler was used by the older generations of Dubliners as colloquial term for child.

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

#247

Post by groovy2shoes »

kpil wrote: post #158
philwelch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I liked the story of young web developer who suggested a new glyph for 'Th' since it was clearly missing, blizzfully unaware of the letter Thor that had been used in English until printing became available.

I þink you mean þe letter "þorn" ("thorn") ;)

Ðere was also ðe letter "ðæt" ("that"), a later invention ðat began as a stylistic alternative to þorn in Old English manuscripts, but fell out of favour early in þe Middle English period (during þe 1200s or so).

Þorn continued to be used to a limited extent in early printed works of English. The digraph started to supplant it already in manuscripts during the Middle English period, with being retained only in limited contexts well before the introduction of the press in Europe (contexts being primarily common sigla (scribal abbreviations) like for "the" and for "that", and occasionally when the scribe felt like they might run out of room on the line).

See some previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16059265

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