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Abusing Plurals
Thursday, January 13th, 2005 07:42 pm[prompted by a discussion in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earthemp6's journal]
I am used to watching my students sympathetically as they struggle with the tortuous distinctions between singular and plural in English. It is not just that some plurals are irregular (e.g. "child" / "children"); matters are made worse by nouns which can sometimes take a plural but are uncountable (and hence singular) at other times (e.g. "behaviour" or "cheese"). Occasionally you can even have plurals of plurals, as in "the peoples of the world", which is not quite the same as "the people of the world". Then there is the question of what to do with foreign or archaic words, which I noticed in my students' essays on Aquinas: what is the plural of articulus or objectio? Then there is the translator's preference to leave ad in the Latin, which led to sentences like "There are no ads in this articulus" (it must have been a special subscribers' page).
My general rule for this is to apply English morphology wherever possible. Thus the plural of "virus" is "viruses", not "viri" (and certainly not "virii", which is bad Latin), and the plural of "buddha" is "buddhas", not, er, whatever. Of course some foreign plurals have become entrenched in the language, to the extent that more people know and use the word "bacteria" than its singular, "bacterium". In this case, saying "bacteriums" would sound silly. Sometimes the plural even becomes so common that people start to use it as a singular, hence such monstrosities as "Television is a powerful media."
While this irks me, it is probably unavoidable. It is certainly not unique to English. For example, Turkish has adopted a large number of words from Arabic, and Turks are never sure what to do with the morphology, especially since Turkish is agglutinative (meaning that you change the form of the word by adding bits on the end) while Arabic is, well, weird. Take, for example, the Arabic word for "side", which is taraf in the singular, and etraf in the plural (or maybe the other way round). After struggling with these loan-words, Turks opted for the simple Turkish plural ending -lar. However, they put this on both the singular and plural forms, changing the meaning in the process: taraflar means the two sides of a dispute or game, while etraflar means something like "surroundings".
Anyway, if you are ever tempted to abuse plurals, remember this sentence: "We have a new data, so we need a criteria for detecting virii in this media."
earthemp6's journal]I am used to watching my students sympathetically as they struggle with the tortuous distinctions between singular and plural in English. It is not just that some plurals are irregular (e.g. "child" / "children"); matters are made worse by nouns which can sometimes take a plural but are uncountable (and hence singular) at other times (e.g. "behaviour" or "cheese"). Occasionally you can even have plurals of plurals, as in "the peoples of the world", which is not quite the same as "the people of the world". Then there is the question of what to do with foreign or archaic words, which I noticed in my students' essays on Aquinas: what is the plural of articulus or objectio? Then there is the translator's preference to leave ad in the Latin, which led to sentences like "There are no ads in this articulus" (it must have been a special subscribers' page).
My general rule for this is to apply English morphology wherever possible. Thus the plural of "virus" is "viruses", not "viri" (and certainly not "virii", which is bad Latin), and the plural of "buddha" is "buddhas", not, er, whatever. Of course some foreign plurals have become entrenched in the language, to the extent that more people know and use the word "bacteria" than its singular, "bacterium". In this case, saying "bacteriums" would sound silly. Sometimes the plural even becomes so common that people start to use it as a singular, hence such monstrosities as "Television is a powerful media."
While this irks me, it is probably unavoidable. It is certainly not unique to English. For example, Turkish has adopted a large number of words from Arabic, and Turks are never sure what to do with the morphology, especially since Turkish is agglutinative (meaning that you change the form of the word by adding bits on the end) while Arabic is, well, weird. Take, for example, the Arabic word for "side", which is taraf in the singular, and etraf in the plural (or maybe the other way round). After struggling with these loan-words, Turks opted for the simple Turkish plural ending -lar. However, they put this on both the singular and plural forms, changing the meaning in the process: taraflar means the two sides of a dispute or game, while etraflar means something like "surroundings".
Anyway, if you are ever tempted to abuse plurals, remember this sentence: "We have a new data, so we need a criteria for detecting virii in this media."
