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waxwing
Joined: 29 Jun 2003
Posts: 719
Location: China
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 Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 6:48 am Post subject: |
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| Brian Caulfield wrote: |
Non count nouns can be used with the plural form of adding an s when describing the different classifications or subspecies of the thing . An example is ,;The fishes of the seas are dieing . Or the monies of the world are depreciating .
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Spelling mistake: dieing -> dying
Two points to make here:
1. I understand what you're trying to explain, but in my opinion it's much better to use this explanation: "there are no uncountable nouns, only uncountable contexts". The two examples you give are not very good IMHO, the latter because we would never use 'monies' here but instead 'currencies' (monies is maybe used in law nowadays but otherwise it's a very old form), the former for a couple of reasons, but mainly because fish is not a non-count noun (except in the context of flesh being eaten, where it becomes a 'substance' type noun); it's simply a count noun with a highly irregular plural 'fish' and a second more regular plural 'fishes' which, as you're saying, is most often used to refer to types of fish.
Actually I think there are a few "uncountable nouns" which come close to being precisely that - among them information, money. It's the substance nouns like sugar, water etc. to which the rule "there are no uncountable nouns, only uncountable contexts" is particularly applicable.
2. It is 'Maths' because it is an abbreviation of Mathematics. It is not a plural describing different types. Thus correct would be 'Maths is complicated' not 'Maths are complicated'. It is neither better nor worse than the American abbreviation Math. |
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Kurochan
Joined: 01 Mar 2003
Posts: 944
Location: China
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| Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 7:04 am Post subject: BVE |
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| Yu wrote: |
Ace... what is wrong with Englishes? As Chris said it refers to other types of Englishes.
I am being serious about Chinglish being able to be considered a form of English tough... I mean could that argument be made? BEV is considered an acceptable form of English. How is this different from Chinglish? |
I think "Englishes" is academic-ese. Maybe that's why Ace isn't familiar with it.
The reason why Black Vernacular English is considered a legitimate dialect is that it has set grammatical and structural rules; it's not just a random mish-mosh. For example, "He busy," is always different than, "He be busy," and all BVE speakers would be able to understand the meaning the same way. That's what makes it different from Chinglish, which is random, and different from individual to individual. |
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ContemporaryDog
Joined: 21 May 2003
Posts: 1477
Location: Wuhan, China
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| Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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I'm confused now. I always write 'dreamed', 'burned' etc. I've always thought that 'burnt' and 'dreamt' were the US spellings!!!!!
One difference I've noticed is that in the US they speak of a sports team in the singular, e.g.
"England won its first game of the world cup", where we say "England won their first game".
Another one which I picked up on yesterday - yanks say "Loan" even when someone is just lending them a pen for five minutes. WHereas for me, loan implies borrowing money from the bank. |
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Yu
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 1219
Location: Shanghai
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| Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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So, yes Firstly is in the dictionary. But I did not find the usage.
So, if I were writing some instructions, would it be correct for me to say someting like: Firstly, take all of the parts out of the box. Secondly, Arrange them by size. Thirdly, insert the short one into the t shaped one... etc... and could this be followed by fourthly, fifthly, sixthly, seventhly, eighthly, ninthly, and tenthly? |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:39 pm Post subject: Adverbs of ordinal numbers |
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| Yu wrote: |
| [...] Could this be followed by fourthly, fifthly, sixthly, seventhly, eighthly, ninthly, and tenthly? |
Logically, yes, because these are all adverbs of ordinal numbers. One could, in theory, have adverbs such as "twenty-thirdly" in a list of at least 23 points. However, usage takes apparent precedence over what is linguistically possible within a language.
The fact that is that people hardly ever go beyond "fifthly" (in my experience, anyway!) when listing things. By this point, people usually drop the "-ly" ending of the adverb and say the ordinal number by itself, i.e., "sixth", "seventh", and so on. However, they are still adverbs in that sense despite the loss of the "-ly" ending simply because people don't say them.
Owing to the fact that the ending is never stated on such high ordinal numbers when used as adverbs, it is likely that they are not found in dictionaries, but maybe somebody somewhere does have a very large English dictionary that actually lists such adverbs. |
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