5 Apr
2013
5 Apr
'13
7:07 a.m.
**************************************
On Thu, 4 Apr 2013, Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
A little stupid.. I know about the rules for appending
an S in the right
place, I just
can't seem to master them.
> I thought that perhaps Swedish does not have such a concept but then
> I saw that he does speak of power supplieS and fanS; he even talks
> about making the CPU's pin compatible, although instead of multiple
> pins of multiple CPUs that seems to suggest making the (single) pin
> of a single CPU compatible with something...
English has inconsistent rules, and freely breaks them.
It seems to have more IRREGULAR conjugations, declensions, and plurals.
Can anyone explain why the 'I' is after the 'E' in "WEIRD"?
"I disconnected the speaker on all of the computers in the lab." does not
imply that they share a speaker. Should I have said that I disconnected
the "speakerS"? or maybe "the speaker on EACH computer"?
And, in this particular example, "pin compatible" (or
"pin-compatible")
is a commonly used adjective that is not plural, no matter how many pins
the device has.
The object noun in the speaker sentence is the speaker, therefore if you disconnected
more than one it would be "speakers" regardless of how many computers they were
connected to. Same goes for the pin-compatible CPUs - the noun is the CPU, therefore pin
remains singular (even though you're talking about multiple pins on multiple CPUs).
Same logic that gives us "attorneys-general" and "gins and tonic" and
a whole lot of confusion.
As for weird, I just tell the students it's a weird word.
Was it Bernard Shaw that threw away the rules he considered pointless and archaic? I know
about cummings and capitalization, but that does little to make his poems easier to read
or more comprehensible.