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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. M
by Aardwolf 8y ago
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"??
- amaccuish 8y agoIn other languages, there is a number (dual) that deals with cases like this. It's been dropping from most languages where it's used. In Russian it's mostly gone, but alot of the endings remain. Also lot's of languages when borrowing from English do away with the plural if it's obvious. Like in french, a pair of jeans is just un jean, singular.
- gizmo686 8y agoDual doesn't really help in this case. In a dual system, we would have something like: 1 pant 2 pantx 3+ pants The problem with the words op is describing is that they should, semantically, belong to the category of 1 object, but morphologically (and syntactically) belong to the category of not-1 object. Adding a separate category for 2 objects does not address this.
- SilasX 8y agoEnglish has some vestiges of the grammatical dual, in terms of having a special word for the case of two: both vs all, either vs any, neither vs none. (And for real pedants, between vs among.)
- csours 8y agoFor 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.
- _red 8y agoHow 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.
- jacobolus 8y agoIndefinitely. If you want a history of attempts to fix it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
- posterboy 8y agowhat do you suggest instead: naif, nife, nyve ..?
- whatsstolat 8y agoMove to a phonetic alphabet. E.g. Arabic.
- posterboy 8y agoWe could also just add accents, diacrits to exhaustion to englissh letters. Without that in arabic you couldn't even tell /a/, /e/, /i/ apart, they are all aleph in word initial position. Our orthographie is phine, your pronnuntzashun is just lazy
- kimmk 8y agoYou can write phonetically on the Latin alphabet perfectly fine, for example Finnish does so. In the case of English, its a matter of standardizing the pronunciation of characters (considering it requires every English speaker to essentially learn to write/read again, just changing the alphabet to Arabic is almost easier).
- analog31 8y agoFiguring out those things requires too many maths. ;-)
- sverige 8y agoThat's one of the best tells to detect non-Americans when communicating in writing only. Get them to talk about uni and how much they enjoyed maths.
- weinzierl 8y agoI 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 (singular) and Visa (plural).
- jMyles 8y ago"People" too - as inconsistently numbered as data.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pluma 8y agoThat 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 "people of interest") Yes this is a bit awkward and yes sometimes what's grammatically possible still sounds awkward even to native speakers (e.g. I'd argue "the polices" is a legitimate term when discussing multiple police organisations of a country as an abstract group but it sounds extremely wrong to most people apparently).
- wafflebear 8y agoI believe "persons" is similar to "people" but differs in register. 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".
- notahacker 8y agoIsn't this pretty common in other European languages though? "Pants" is after all an abbreviation of pantalones
- walshemj 8y agoA lot less strange that intimate objects having a gender as you do a French and many other languages
- NullPrefix 8y agos/intimate/inanimate/ ?
- lobster_johnson 8y agoAt 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 language learner almost all of the genders are not discoverable from the semantic meaning of the word. Why is "ei bok" (Norwegian for "a book") feminine, when it's categorically an inanimate thing?
- yorwba 8y ago"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".
- lobster_johnson 8y agoI meant neuter! I studied German for three years in school, but my brain got its wires crossed there for a second.
- rowaway93 8y agoI 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-European/p%C3%A9h%E2%82%82wr%CC%A5 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 http://langevo.blogspot.de/2014/09/four-map.html
- philwelch 8y agoThe W is called "double-u" because it dates from the era when U and V were the same letter (the consonant and vowel versions diverged) and there was no W letter, but only a doubled-U. The phrase, "I want a veal sandwich on Tuesday" would have been spelled, "I uuant a ueal sanduuich on Tuesday" (or, alternatively, "I vvant a veal sandvvich on Tvesday"). This is also why u, v, and w are consecutive in the alphabet. 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'".
- flashman 8y agoThe 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). Of course, this isn't universal, there are counter-examples of U used initially and V used medially!
- philwelch 8y agoYeah, 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 British spellings of "foetus" and "encyclopaedia" but were, at some times, seen as actual letters. American spelling reforms erased this particular weirdness from our dialect.
- kpil 8y agoI 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.
- kazinator 8y agoGrammatically 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, getting wet, or being sewn differently, or other such contexts.)
- xyzzyz 8y agoIt’s funny to compare Slovak with Polish — you could also use “kleszcze” for pliers (and “kleszcz” is also tick), but it sounds archaic — today you’d say “szczypce” or “kombinerki”, which are also nouns without singular form. Also, “pants” are called “spodnie”, which also lacks singular form, but “nogawa/nogawka” still means a pant leg.
- V-2 8y ago"Kleszcze" may sound archaic, but it's technically a correct term (to denote a very specific type of tool). So DIY nerds wouldn't agree with you.
- Asooka 8y agoThat's so interesting. In Bulgarian we're starting to interchangeably use singular/plural versions of some of these words. E.g. "scissors" is "nozhici" (ножици), but very often used in its singular "nozhica"; similar with pants - nominally "pantaloni" (borrowed from French, of course), but very often encountered as a "pantalon". However, "pliers" and "glasses" cannot be comfortably made to assume a singular form, so they're always plural.
- kazinator 8y ago> kombinierki In Slovak, there is "kombinačky", which is shortening from "kombinované kliešte". Basically more or less the same item as as "combination pliers".
- smcl 8y ago
- dragonwriter 8y ago> 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. As a countable noun, aside from also being a drinking vessel, "a glass" is a lens or monocle. A pair of glasses is exactly a pair of those. These definitions are still in current use. Its true that the singular terms for the others are no longer in common current use, so the plural seems odd, but glasses is a particularly bad example.