Timeline for Plural form of country names
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 12, 2021 at 12:58 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Oct 12, 2021 at 14:47 | |||||
| Oct 5, 2021 at 11:40 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @PeteKirkham: I see you resisted the temptation to write Both citys were affected! :) | |
| Oct 5, 2021 at 11:03 | comment | added | Pete Kirkham | It seems that the 1940/50s references are all to do with flood defences on the Kansas river which were being built at the time. Both cities were affected. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 19:40 | comment | added | alephzero | @WaterMolecule Rugby is a sport similar to what the USA laughingly calls football, except that the players don't wear body armour and the play is way more aggressive. Take off his protective gear, and the average NFL professional would be on a stretcher within 5 minutes against a rugby team. There are some safety rules, but "poking your opponent's eye out during a tackle is illegal" would be typical one. Historically, professional rugby in the UK was mostly played by former coal miners, and they applied the same standards on the pitch as when down the mine. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 18:52 | comment | added | Dan | 1 Wales = 6.61 Rhode Islands | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 17:31 | history | edited | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 537 characters in body
|
| Oct 4, 2021 at 17:22 | comment | added | IMSoP | @FumbleFingers Frankly, "Marys" and "Kennedys" look weird to me as well, and I don't see any particular reason for such a rule to exist, but you appear to be correct that it does. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 17:12 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @IMSoP: Plural Italys looks unfamiliar because we very rarely have reason to use it. But surely when you consider three Hail Marys and two Kennedys you can see the basic rule being applied here. And it would be really strange to claim that proper noun names of countries should observe different syntactic rules to proper noun names of people. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 17:02 | comment | added | IMSoP | The rule that "country names shouldn't be arbitrarily tinkered with" strikes me as actually a rather odd one - we are already "tinkering" when we use an "s" to indicate the plural regardless of the name's origin so why would we not also apply the "y" -> "ies" rule? The spelling "Italys" just looks bizarre to me, and I'm surprised to see anyone consider it correct. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 16:13 | comment | added | WaterMolecule | @FumbleFingers They are called football fields. What's rugby? ;) | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 14:47 | comment | added | Chris H | Rugby (union) pitches are a subdivision of Wales, while football pitches are a subdivision of England, except Lancashire and Cheshire where you have to convert to rugby league pitches! And I come here most days, for my sins. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 14:44 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | There's no shame in going to Wales occasionally, to see how the other half live. I think football pitches (or is it rugby pitches? :) are just a subdivision unit of Wales (like Satoshis are a subdivision unit of Bitcoin). | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 13:45 | comment | added | Chris H | I'm actually in Wales at the moment! (but live in England). Don't forget the football pitch (soccer to foreigners and only to foreigners) and the double-decker bus for area and volume/mass respectively. I'm not sure, from the very limited hits, anyone really uses Vatican City for size comparison. Instead I suspect someone found an area and looked at a list of land areas on Wikipedia. Incidentally the conversion is about 41 kiloVaticans to the Wales. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 13:38 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | For us Brits, the two standard "large sizes" for comparisons are A brontosaurus was bigger than a whale and that iceberg is bigger than Wales. We don't do "Vatican City" as a metaphoric unit of area. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 13:00 | comment | added | Chris H | I suspected that like the Two Frances in the comments, there was a contrast between two communities in the same space - and I was right for one hit, but the other provides an interesting alternative use - that of "Vatican City" as a unit of area. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 12:57 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I think Vatican City is a special case Even I can't really get my head around two Vatican Citys. But there are a handful of references to two Vatican Cities in Google Books, and I'm not gonna argue with that orthography! | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 12:52 | history | edited | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 857 characters in body
|
| Oct 4, 2021 at 12:41 | comment | added | Chris H | I'm inclined to agree, especially as there aren't enough examples to spot a trend (most countries ending --y are irrelevant, like Turkey, Uruguay, etc.; ngrams can't find Vatican Cit[y|ie]s at all) | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 12:39 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | No, I don't think there's any defensible "principle" underpinning the difference between countries and people here. The Italys / Italies distinction is quite extreme, but more people get it "right" with two Hungarys, for example. But I could easily believe that at least some of the people who get it "wrong" (by my lights) are being misled by extrapolation from country / countries. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 12:04 | comment | added | Chris H | Interesting observation. It makes me wonder whether, in practice as opposed to (your) theory, there's a difference between the plurals of proper names of people and of countries. For Germany (of which there were of course two quite recently) the ratio is close to 1:1, with --ies slightly ahead until a reversal in 2006 (perhaps country-> countries) has something to do with it | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 11:35 | history | answered | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 4.0 |