LINGUAPHILES & SESQUIPEDALIANS

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Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on November 14, 2011 at 1:31pm

My new favorite Wikipedia page: Latin Profanity.

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on October 8, 2011 at 6:59pm

Colour me prefixed Following up last week’s comments about words starting in en- and em- for imbuing something with colour, Andrew Palmer and Dave Cook supplied the first sentence of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native: “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.”

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Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on September 23, 2011 at 5:47pm

That is funny, but I am impressed at how erudite and courteous they are. If that has been posted on a US news site everyone would be accusing one another of being a socialist.

Comment by qıƃ ɟ ǝıɔɐɹʇ on September 23, 2011 at 5:06pm

re: linguaphiles at The Guardian, food fighting conundra, hahaha I love this shit

Comment by Keith Brian Johnson on September 22, 2011 at 1:24am

I hope it's only a *small* debate.  I understand wanting--and have argued for--the retention of standards of English usage over time; however, where meaning is clearly unaffected and where either form will be (or at least should be) understood by any reasonably proficient English speaker, I should think we would give people a pass if they used the "wrong" plural.  Aside from that, of course, is whether or not "conundrum" has the right etymology to properly be pluralized "conundra," which is a question I am not qualified to answer.

Comment by AnneT on September 21, 2011 at 9:20pm

Today I looked up the plural of conundrum.  There is a big debate about whether it is conundrums or conundra.

The comments are very funny if you feel like reading some linguaphiles going at it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-5253,00.html

 

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 20, 2011 at 11:52am

heh, yes but given the japanese habit of dropping the subject of the sentence, i never hear tachi or ra used in ordinary conversation.  it seems to me that its used mostly by politicians to spread responsibility for what ever they are proposing

Comment by Natalie A Sera on September 20, 2011 at 7:49am

Carl, Japanese DOES have plurals, at least for people, such as -tachi (anatatachi), and -ra (warera). But there are no commonly used plurals for other nouns. That doesn't present a problem, though, because you can always use an adjective or prefix such as takusan or sukoshi or suu- or whatever, to indicate that you are talking about more than one thing. It fascinates me how different languages manage to get the same information across in different ways! :-)

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 20, 2011 at 1:47am

wow, thank you for the info. btw, japanese has no plural either.

Comment by Keith Brian Johnson on September 20, 2011 at 1:15am

That seems similar to the apparently decreased appreciation of the difference between "less" and "fewer."  I am not sure this is really a bad thing, since it amounts to a recognition that number is a species of the genus amount.  But it does seem less precise than does preserving the distinction between "how much" and "how many"--although nobody seems to be bothered by using "more" both for continuous and distinct quantities.  Maybe it's because quantum mechanics makes us view everything as quantized anyway!

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