[forkies]

Is there a linguistic rule for the difference in using a singular or plural word when one says, "I like apples" or "I like spaghetti"?

why are some things like "apples" or "sports" plural while others are singular like "spaghetti" or "tennis"

[fireside]

english was designed by drunk 70 year olds. it makes no sense.

[TubaMuffins]

I dont recall who said it, but a famous writer once said that "The english language is like throwing mud at a wall." Although latin based languages are typically easy to learn. English is the second most difficult language to learn (right behing Mandarin Chinese i think) because it has so many daamn rules and exceptions.

[spiky_dog]

er, that's because spaghetti is plural on its own, no one (properly, in english) speaks of multiple spaghettis but rather of multiple kinds of spaghetti. you always use the plural form to the best of my knowlege -- it's just that some plural forms are irregular.

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by TubaMuffins:
I dont recall who said it, but a famous writer once said that "The english language is like throwing mud at a wall." Although latin based languages are typically easy to learn. English is the second most difficult language to learn (right behing Mandarin Chinese i think) because it has so many daamn rules and exceptions.

Chinese, Japanese and Dutch are the most difficult if you ask me. English is really really easy in my experience.

[ae77]

tennis is an uncountable noun. spaghetti, as spiky_dog says, is already plural.

[DeathMan]

The difficulty of a language can only be measured in relation to another language. Mandarin would be quite difficult to an American English Speaker, but might be much easier for someone who knows Cantonese or even Japanese.

Its silly to discuss what language is the most difficult. (and I don't mean silly like it is thrown around here. I mean, just silly.)

[TubaMuffins]

the difficulty of the languages isnt my opinion, i read it a long while back. I think the criteria they used to "rate" the difficulties were the amount of rules and exceptions, how many different ways you can say the same thing with different words, and in the case of chinese, how there is a different character for every word (thats my understanding) as opposeed to latin based languages or others like Japanese that have alphbets to construct words. Don't quote me, all I'm saying is that English is a sloppy language.

[DeathMan]

Originally posted by TubaMuffins:
all I'm saying is that English is a sloppy language.

I won't argue with you there. Brian Regan

[undotwa]

Originally posted by TubaMuffins:
I dont recall who said it, but a famous writer once said that "The english language is like throwing mud at a wall." Although latin based languages are typically easy to learn. English is the second most difficult language to learn (right behing Mandarin Chinese i think) because it has so many daamn rules and exceptions.

English is not a Latin based language. English is a Germanic language at heart, despite the fact that 50% of our words come from Romance or Latin languages. We use about 2000 or so different words everyday, most of these 'everyday' words are Germanic in origin. Latin words came into the English language in the 11th-14th centuries through Norman French, and then from the 14th centuries directly from Latin through neo-classicism and humanism.

[Aquataris]

As a stupid person I often ponder why a single pair of pants are/is/? still a pair.

[Oisín]

1. TubaMuffins, wherever you read it, it's cr*p. There is no way of measuring neutrally if a language is easier or harder to learn than another. The only way one could possibly do this was to look at how old children who speak this language natively are when they can be considered fluent, and even this wouldn't work properly. As DeathMan said, the difficulty of a language can only be 'measured' (or even seen) in relation to another language. While every language will be extremely easy to learn for some people, it will be extremely hard to learn for others.

2. As several people have said, spaghetti is already plural. I suppose in Italian, there's a singular form spaghetto? I'm not sure, but there should be, theoretically speaking. (Is 'spago' a word in Italian? Meaning rope, or something else that's long and thin?)

3. Yes, there are rules as to when you use the singular form and when you use the plural form in such an example as you gave, forkies. Plural forms are used with countable nouns (such as apples - an apple is one singular object, which you can count easily); singular, or rather, mass, forms are used with uncountable nouns (aka. mass nouns), of which coffee would be an example. Coffee is not something you can count, because it is not a limited object with clear 'borders' - rather, it is a substance, and you need to qualify it before knowing how much of it there is. You can of course say 'one coffee, two coffees' etc., but then you are not counting the coffee, but rather the container which gives the coffee its borders (ie. 'one coffee' = 'one cup of coffee' - a cup is an easily countable object).

5. Regarding the difficulties of alphabets vs. idiographic writing systems (such as Chinese), alphabets don't always make things easier. It is true that to be completely, 100% fluent in Chinese writing, you would have to know, in exactness and correct stroke order, more than 20,000 characters (Chinese doesn't have a character for every word, incidentally, but for every syllable. Although each character does have its own distinct meaning, there are many many words that consist of more than one character). But this is, in a way, no different from English, where you would have to know how to spell more than 100,000 words to be completely fluent (not counting overly obscure technical terms and such).

Japanese, by the way, is not a good example of a language that has an 'alphabet'; not only do they use well over 2,000 [IIRC] Chinese characters, in slightly different forms usually, these characters can often be pronounced in at least 5 ways per character (I believe 生 in Japanese has 11 different pronunciations). To add to this, they also have three other alphabets, two of which (Katakana and Hiragana) are used in combination with the borrowed Chinese characters, and the third one (Romanji) is a Latin transcription system.

6. No, English is not 'Latin-based'. In fact, there are no languages that are 'Latin-based'. English, as well as all other Germanic, Romance, Slavic and quite a few other languages, including Hindu, are Indo-European. Latin was never the basis of any language, except Italian, which is basically the modern form of Popular Latin, in the same way that what we call English (ie. this) is the modern form of what Shakespeare wrote 400-odd years ago.

As a stupid person I often ponder why a single pair of pants are/is/? still a pair.

Because 'a pant' in its original meaning was one leg of a pair of pants. If you have two legs, you have a pair, which is of course what you wear. And it should, I believe, be 'a pair of pants is still a pair', not '...are...', since the logical subject of the sentence is the pair (of which there's only one), not the pants (of which there are two).

[Xeo]

Some countable nouns are simply the same as their singular. I Googled but the best I could come up with is that they are just exceptions you need to learn and have no formula you learn.

[forkies]

i knew about countable and uncountable nouns, but just hadn`t considered it when thinking about this issue. thx for the help

[Oisín]

Then there is of course the subtle difference between saying, "I like apples" and saying, "I like Apple", which, linguistically speaking, is a whole other plate of, er, apples...

Some countable nouns are simply the same as their singular. I Googled but the best I could come up with is that they are just exceptions you need to learn and have no formula you learn.

Good rule of thumb though: Quite a few of the nouns that in English have the same singular and plural forms are names of animals.

[Eriamjh]

"spaghetti" is an Italian word. In english, it refers to a type of noodle or noodle dish. It is singular in English, not plural.

"Spaghetti dishes" would be plural.

I'm not so sure "spaghettis" would be a real word in english.

Anyone speak Italian? If spaghetti is plural in Italian, what is the singular form? Spaghettum?

[Oisín]

Originally posted by Eriamjh:
"spaghetti" is an Italian word. In english, it refers to a type of noodle or noodle dish. It is singular in English, not plural.

"Spaghetti dishes" would be plural.

I'm not so sure "spaghettis" would be a real word in english.

According to Cambridge's dictionary, it's uncountable. When you say 'one spaghetti', you're not qualifying the spaghetti itself, but the 'containter', which also just happens to be the spaghetti itself. 'Spaghettis' would, if used, be referring to different forms of spaghetti, not several 'strings' of spaghetti. But I would maintain that it's an uncountable plural noun (like clothes, pants, fowl, etc.), not an uncountable singular one (coffee, rice, meat).

Anyone speak Italian? If spaghetti is plural in Italian, what is the singular form? Spaghettum?

No, that would be (Pig) Latin. In Italian, it would (providing it's regular) be spaghetto, which again would be a diminutive of spago. As far as I can tell from some online translators, though, the singular (or non-diminutised) form of spaghetti doesn't seem to exist in Italian either.

[rjenkinson]

Originally posted by forkies:
Is there a linguistic rule for the difference in using a singular or plural word when one says, "I like apples" or "I like spaghetti"?

why are some things like "apples" or "sports" plural while others are singular like "spaghetti" or "tennis"

the final i on "spaghetti" already indicates the word is plural so pluralizing it again would make no sense (same thing with graffito/graffiti).

Originally posted by Aquataris:
As a stupid person I often ponder why a single pair of pants are/is/? still a pair.

because they are a pair of two legs stitched together.

-r.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by Ois�n:
No, that would be (Pig) Latin.

Pig latin would be Aghetti-spay.

[Oisín]

Originally posted by Xeo:
Pig latin would be Aghetti-spay.

Yeah, I know, I was making a joke based on the fact that 'spaghettum' could never be Latin. If anything, it would have to be 'spagettum'.

[GoGoReggieXPowars]

Anyone else notice that Oisín skipped 4?

[turtle777]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
Anyone else notice that Oisín skipped 4?

What ?

-t

[cpt kangarooski]

Oisín--

I suppose in Italian, there's a singular form spaghetto?

Spaghettio. In their plural form, they come in a can, and are fairly nasty.

[Oisín]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
Anyone else notice that Oisín skipped 4?

Haha! Yeah, that shows pretty well that I'm a language-freak, not a math-freak

[turtle777]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
Anyone else notice that Oisín skipped 4?

Originally posted by turtle777:
What ?

Ok. Got it.


-t

[macroy]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
Anyone else notice that Oisín skipped 4?

Perhaps he's superstitious - 4 is unlucky in Chinese culture (sounds similar to 'death').....

[Oisín]

Originally posted by macroy:
Perhaps he's superstitious - 4 is unlucky in Chinese culture (sounds similar to 'death').....

Yeah, that's it, exactly! No "si" for me, please... well, okay, I'm not superstitious, I think it's a load of crock, but it sounds better than just being a dumbass with numbers

[olePigeon]

Here's a simple rhyme you should learn so you can spell any English word:

"I" before "E", except when it's not.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by Oisín:
Yeah, I know, I was making a joke based on the fact that 'spaghettum' could never be Latin. If anything, it would have to be 'spagettum'.

Except, since it's always plural, wouldn't it be "spagetti" ?

[Guy Stone]

1 mushroom

5 shrooms

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by Guy Stone:
1 mushroom

5 shrooms

1 mushtrootum
5 shroomi

[Stradlater]

Originally posted by forkies:
Is there a linguistic rule for the difference in using a singular or plural word when one says, "I like apples" or "I like spaghetti"?

why are some things like "apples" or "sports" plural while others are singular like "spaghetti" or "tennis"

Spaghetti is [almost] always eaten en masse [or in mass, anyway].

Tennis is a concept, a sport; there isn't really more than one tennis.