Re: CHAT: San Marino

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:

> > Which is to say 5.37 euros (yes, "euros"; English is not German)
>
> "Euro" to me would be a short (perhaps slightly derogatory) form for "European".
> "euro" is fairly obviously the currency.
Not my point.  The EU wants us anglophones to say "one euro, two euro; one
cent, two cent", which is clearly against the spirit of English.
Similarly, invariant "euro" and "cent" give Irish the fits. See Michael Everson's
rants at http://www.egt.ie/standards/iso10646/euro :

> The correct Irish Gaelic forms of euro should be eora, pl. eoraí (cf. deora
> 'furrow'). The genitive singulars should be na h-eora and an cheint,
> ["ceint" is the already existing Irish word for "cent"]
> and normal mutations must apply: 7 n-eora, 5 cheint, 7 gceint. In the English
> language, the correct plurals in all contexts must be euros and
> cents. The other options are both ungrammatical Irish and ungrammatical English.
>
> Politically speaking, the European Commission has no right to prescribe,
> or even to endorse, the orthographical or grammatical forms of any word
> in any language, whether official or not. This right belongs to the people
> of Europe. In Ireland, we should exercise this right, and insist on the
> proper terms eora and ceint for the name of our new currency.
--
Anyway, governments are marginal     || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
outside totalitarian states, though  || http://www.reutershealth.com
attention is always focused on them  || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to direct it away from what matters. \\ -- Noam Chomsky (1995)