91–100 of 247 posts
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Not sure if that is directed at me, but I did minor in linguistics.
Certainly not at you, but at the comment you replied to and a lot of comments whenever linguistics-related topics come up here.
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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.
How long are we going to continually spell things like: knife, night, knight, thought, etc. When you add up the generations of wasted human effort in spelling words in such pointless ways, its mind boggling.
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"??
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 (…
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A lot less strange that intimate objects having a gender as you do a French and many other languages
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…
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".
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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
Wha? Oh, you mean quae navis navigaverunt.
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"People" too - as inconsistently numbered as data.
That one is actually because it's two different words: "people" is the plural form of "person", i.e. one person, two people, as a group "people" (pl. "peoples") is a group of people as a unit, e.g. a tribe or an ethnic group or the citizens of a country "persons" is ALSO the plural of "person" but only used when you talk about individuals rather than a group (e.g. "person of interest" -> "persons of interest", not "p…
For example, there is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Obviously, native speakers would say "people with disabilities" in almost every situation, but that would be too informal for the title of a treaty.
Likewise, law enforcement use formal speech such as "persons of interest" to bolster their authority, but nobody would ever say "I sat next to two Australian persons on the flight".
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nife is fine
Why is there an "e" at the end?
So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.
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"??
This is similar to why the & character is called "ampersand"--it was originally considered a letter, and instead of the alphabet ending in "x, y, and z", it ended in "x, y, z, and per-se 'and'".
The article fails to explain why English moved from en to s for plural forms around 1400, though.
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…
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.