Re: Adopting a plural

On Wednesday, October 6, 2004, at 08:32 , Philippe Caquant wrote:

>> Ray Brown (I think) declared:
Yes, 'twas I.

>> Ouch! I assume "hoodla" is intentionally humorous or
> facetious - that one's amusing. But 'agendae' - ach y
> fi! A plural of a plural! How long  before
> we meet "datae"?
>
> We already write "mass medias"
Ach! - and you don't even say the -s!

But then you French like double plurals like "des sphaghettis". I remember
a young French girls who stayed with us once who used to say 'the
spaghettis are ready' (pronouncing the final -s as [z] in the English
manner). We tried several times to explain to her that 'spaghetti' doesn't
have a plural in English & we treat it as a mass noun: 'The spaghetti is
ready."

> in French (and say
> "bliniss", as I mentioned earlier). I don't know what
> is or are hoodla,
A hoodlum is 'a street bully', 'a small time gangster'. "hoodla" is just a
humorous plural - we normally say 'hoodlums' of course.
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On Wednesday, October 6, 2004, at 08:33 , John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
>> But 'agendae' - ach y fi! A plural of a plural! How long
>> before we meet "datae"?
>>
> Well, Google shows about 2000 instances of "agendae", a few of which
> are in fact "agendaE", i.e. "Agenda E".  This is still swamped by the
> 1.3 million instances of "agendas", thankfully.
Thankfully. I think we should explain that 'agendas' is not a double
plural in that 'agenda' is now a singular noun in 21st cent Eng. A pity in
some ways because it means that instead of saying "the first agendum" we
now have to say more long winded "the first item on the agenda". But there'
s no way 'agenda' is going go back to being a plural again.

> Of the 3000 hits for "datae", I skimmed the first few screenfuls: there
> are
> many of the "data E" type, many irrelevancies, and many legitimate Latin
> uses as the fem. pl. of the ppt.  _datus_ 'given, dated'.  But I
> did find things like "a large number of datae".
Groan!! I remember when we had 'datum' with it plural 'data'. I've sort of
reconciled myself to the use of 'data' as a mass noun. But the last shows
that with those speakers/writers 'data' has become a singular countable, i.
e. a datum!

But then I've heard people speaking about 'a criteria' so I guess if uou
googled for "criteriae" you'd find some.

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]