GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: dkw on October 21, 2007, 06:52:55 PM
-
I'm brushing up *cough*relearningfromscratch*cough* my German, and it's reminded me how absolutely bizzare preposition usage is. Why do we stand in the street instead of on the street? And why are houses on the street when they're really beside it? Why are things hanging on the wall, not against the wall? And we attach the picture to the wall in order to hang it from the wall.
Prepositions are weird.
-
By me, we stand on the street. There's even a sometimes news column interviewing the "man on the street".
And we also have the option of standing "on line" or "in line" when we line up, although "on line" is more prevalent.
You know what I really love, though? People who can recite their prepositions to the tune of "Yankee Doodle". That's just hot!
-
And we also have the option of standing "on line" or "in line" when we line up, although "on line" is more prevalent.
I've never heard of standing on line.
-
Looks like it's mostly a tri-state thing. (http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_93.html)
-
With a cluster in SoCal. Which is consistent with my experience.
-
Yep. Bob says "on line." I am trying to break him of that, because it drives me nuts.
This is in direct contradiction to my normal beliefs about not trying to change your spouse's completely harmless habits, but some things just go too far!
-
I'm online right now.
-
That's not the same. :nono:
Oh, and prepositions are just as weird and idiomatic in French. But now my French is rusty enough that I can't remember any good examples.
-
They're weird in Hebrew too. (And, to the tiny degree that I recall my HS Spanish, in Spanish as well.) Totally ruins some jokes in translation. ;)
-
If you are connected to the internet on your PDA while you are waiting in the checkout lane at the supermarket, you can be online while you are waiting on line.
But seriously, rest-of-the-English-speaking-world, lines are one-dimensional. You can't be in them, unless you reduce yourself to a non-dimensional point. That's why all sensible people get on line.
Bob is right on this one. Dana, stop trying to corrupt him.
-
And, speaking of supermarkets, that thing you push around there is a cart. Not a wagon, not a buggy. A shopping CART.
Get it right.
-
What about "trolley"? Is that right out?
-
You betcha.
-
Plurals are also weird. How come "pants" is (are?) plural and "hair" (when referring to the thousands of them on your head) is singular?
-
Hair is singular for the same reason that milk is.
-
And water (which is plural in some languages).
-
That doesn't work -- you can pluck an individual hair, what would be the equivalent for a milk (or water)?
-
When you talk about somebody's hair, you aren't talking about a collection of things (hairs), you're talking about the substance hair.
The same thing happens with the word fish.
-
Hair isn't exactly like milk, because even though we usually refer to it as a mass, it's still made of discrete pieces. In French hair is treated as a plural.
Porter: I'm not quite sure what you mean about fish.
-
Much like hair word fish can be used to describe a single fish or to describe the substance fish.
"We think that Care Bear ate her sister's pet fish the other day."
"Which is odd, because she usually doesn't like to eat fish."
(The second one was made up. The first one, however, is true.)
-
Another word like that is beef, except that the plural of beef isn't beef -- it's beefs or beeves.
-
Okay, gotcha. I disagree that that's analogous to hair, though. A bunch of fish-the-animal together don't make fish-the-substance.
-
That's a good point.
-
A bunch of fish-the-animal together don't make fish-the-substance.
Actually, I think they do.
-
Beeves? Like at Quiznos they have all different kinds of beeves to choose from?
-
That doesn't work -- you can pluck an individual hair, what would be the equivalent for a milk (or water)?
A drop.
-
Beeves? Like at Quiznos they have all different kinds of beeves to choose from?
Beeves (or beefs) is the plural of this definition:
2 a: an ox, cow, or bull in a full-grown or nearly full-grown state; especially : a steer or cow fattened for food <quality Texas beeves> <a herd of good beef> b: a dressed carcass of a beef animal
-
I live in the heart of cattle country, and I've never heard "beeves"
Beef has always been the plural of beef around here.
(like deer and deer)
-
That doesn't work -- you can pluck an individual hair, what would be the equivalent for a milk (or water)?
A drop.
Right, but neither "milk" or water" is the plural of "drop."
Fish confuses the issue because the plural of fish is spelled the same way as the singular. That doesn't mean you're refering to the substance when talking about a school of fish.
And German also uses the plural when discussing haircolor -- Tracy's hairs are red. My hairs are brown.
-
Tracy's hairs are red and white. :D :D :P
-
Right, but neither "milk" or water" is the plural of "drop."
I don't see how that really makes much of a difference, besides confusing the issue.
Or rather, it's the fact that hair (substance) and hair (individual element) look and sound the same that confuses the issue.
Let's suppose that we spoke a dialect where the individual elements of hair were always called strands and never of hairs[/i]. In that case hair would be exactly analogous to milk.
drop : drops : milk :: strand : strands : hair
You can see in this situation what I meant by "Hair is singular for the same reason that milk is."
I don't think that changing the word for the analogy to drop from strand to hair changes the fact that milk and hair, when used as substance nouns are both singular for the same reason. Because they're both substance nouns.
-
Nope, I still don't see it.
Because when you have all the hairs together, you still see the individual hairs (or strands) and when you pull them apart the hairs are the same as they were before. They never lose their individual identity. But if you put a bunch of drops of milk together they lose their individualness and you can't pull out the same drop(s) that you put in.
-
grain of salt : grains of salt : salt :: strand of hair : strands of hair : hair
There could be a dialect where a grain of salt could also be called a salt, just like a strand of hair can also be called a hair.
It wouldn't make it odd that salt (substance) is singular at all, except that it's a funny coincidence that the singular individual noun is identical to the substance noun, which is singular because substance nouns are always singular.
----
Is that actually true? There's the old puzzle "Which weighs more, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?" Are bricks and [/i]feathers[/i] plural substance nouns? I don't think so -- I think they're plural individual nouns, but I'm not positive.
-
Mass nouns do not take the plural inflection, so those would have to be plural count nouns.
link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun)
-
I live in the heart of cattle country, and I've never heard "beeves"
Beef has always been the plural of beef around here.
(like deer and deer)
I read it just the other day in a book by Joe Salatin, a Virginian.
-
I think there's a good chance that Salatin coined that term. I think I've pretty much only seen it used in pasture-farming circles. It's a useful word, though.
--Mel
-
Um, it was in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry for beef which I quoted above:
2 a: an ox, cow, or bull in a full-grown or nearly full-grown state; especially : a steer or cow fattened for food <quality Texas beeves> <a herd of good beef> b: a dressed carcass of a beef animal
---------
stone : stones : stone
-
Ooh! Good one.
-
I stand corrected.
--Mel