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'".
> 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!
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.
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 <th> digraph started to supplant it already in manuscripts during the Middle English period, with <þ> being retained only in limited contexts well before the introduction of the press in Europe (contexts being primarily common sigla (scribal abbreviations) like <þᵉ> for "the" and <þᵗ> 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
I'm having trouble parsing this. What was the meaning of this phrase?
A mondegreen of "and per se and", meaning "and (the character) '&' by itself", which is how the symbol (&) was originally referred to in English. This formulation is due to the fact that in schools, when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "O" and, at one point, "&") was preceded by the Latin expression per se (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet#Uncommon_lett...
In Arabic, oo and v are both bilabial sounds (produced using both lips). In Persian, v is pronounced more labio-dentally (bottom lip, top teeth), which is perhaps what causes the confusion.
But the lack of written distinction for these sounds is common in many scripts including Indian, Greek, and older Latin.
(Finland is bilingual, and the characters sets, keyboards and sorting rules are same both for Finnish and Swedish.)
English French Slovak
pliers pinces kliešte
pants pantalons nohavice
scissors ciseaux nožnice
In Slovak, there is "kombinačky", which is shortening from "kombinované kliešte". Basically more or less the same item as as "combination pliers".
And weirdly the Czech for "pliers" isn't the same as "ticks":
Slovak Czech
kliešte kleště
kliešť klíště
kliešte klíšťata
A pair of pants is un pantalon, and a pair of pliers is also just une pince.
"Lunettes" (glasses) would be another word that is usually plural. Juste one lunette is a scope for just one eye (or some circular object with a hole in the middle).
pants -> Finnish "housut", scissors -> "sakset"; there is no singular "housu" or "saksi" in that meaning. As above, there is the singular "saksi" but it means a Saxon.
None of those examples in English unambiguously denote single objects, they all denote indefinite numbered collections. The explicit singular object in each case is "a pair of X", where "X" is the term you have listed, and that is a grammatically singular noun phrase denoting a singular object.
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).
"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).
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".
Admittedly, it's more likely I'd say "I sat next to two Ozzies on the flight." (No, not Aussies, Ozzies. Like Ozzy Ozbourne. Because that's how it sounds to me when Aussies say 'Aussies.')
Which contexts did you have in mind?
See also: Meccano, Duplo, Brio, Scalextric.
Is "gimme the lego over there" strange? I think it is, and if it is, then it's an interesting dater point to support this hypothesis.
I appreciate the apparent strangeness of this, but it's certainly not unique within the language.
That's English! :)
"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.
There is also the noun vīsum, -ī, plural visa with the primary meaning the seen [thing], appearance, perception. This is the word that was borrowed into English and other languages.
Wha? Oh, you mean quae navis navigaverunt.
This applies to the singulars that denote single objects too: scissor lift, pant leg; not scissors lift or pants leg.
According to this principle, it should be datum point, where only the head noun point may be pluralized.
"Datum point" exists, but I've never seen or heard it in use; it's just a "confirm by Google".
Were you also commenting on its pronunciation? I'd instead say: "data" is a mass noun like "mahyonnaise" and "tomahto sauce".
And 'in agreeance' instead of 'in agreement.'
Think coffee - you have one coffee (singular), two coffees (plural), and some coffee (an indeterminate amount).
One datum, Two data, Some data.
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.
I do wonder if simpler english will ever catch on
I do wondr if simplr nglsh wil evr cach on.
If you want a history of attempts to fix it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.
(No, I didn't know this word existed before this moment.)
Define "pointless". Each word has its own etymology, and if we're going to be honest here, the different spellings aren't _that_ complicated. Take it up with English's ancestors for borrowing words from many different languages, and then with more recent ancestors for the great vowel shift, among other things leading to change.
Language is never going to make sense. It's not prescriptive- we just make changes, arbitrarily, sometimes due to mistakes, and it either catches on or it doesn't. Trying to "fix" language is an impossible task because no one is making the rules. English in particular doesn't have a language council making decisions, unlike say, Korean. It doesn't matter anyways because "Standard English" is quite different than day to day conversation, and even in formal settings it's based on stylistic guidelines, not hard rules.
Just let it be- devising an _arbitrary_ method of attempting to corral an entire language is an impossible task. And any work would be undone within one generation anyways since languages evolve. Esperanto, a manufactured language, has already seen linguistic changes by its native speakers (kids who were taught it growing up).
Also, I think your "simpler" transcription is actually less phonologically accurate.
For instance, I would transcribe the "er" in "wonder" as [ɝ]. In some dialects, it would actually just be [ɜ] without any pronounced trace of the "r" like sound. In actuallity, I suspect that it is actually [ɜɹ] underlying, and the two sounds just coalesce into [ɝ] when you pronounce them.
That is to say, the "er" sound is viewed a variant of the vowel moreso than it is a variant of "r". I have the same complaint about "simplr" and "evr".
For "nglsh", I just do not see any motivation to remove the vowels. It is true that English allows "n" to act as a vowel, but in "English", there is a pretty clear [I] (as in Igloo) before the [n]. Similarly, [l] could act as a vowel, but there is also a pretty clear [I] following it.
Finally for "cach", I can't really complain about this being worse, as "ch" is our way of writing tsh ( /t͡ʃ/ ), but if we are simplifying English, it would be nice to clean up this too and show the relationship between that sound and the t sound.
That mike car
Him going there
-- my school teacher
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".
It stands to reason that the feminin came to be at the boundary between these.
[1] 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).
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.
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.