On 9/22/19 8:52 PM, Justin B Rye wrote: >> The origin of the word is Latin. The word is grammatically >> neutrum, for which the singular is "-um", the plural is "-a". It's >> not a mess at all. > > Etymology does not determine current grammatical behaviour.
Official dictionaries do, again, look it up: > https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/media the mediatreated as singular or plural The main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet) regarded collectively. ‘their demands were publicized by the media’ 2 plural form of medium Then click on "medium" and you get the definition of what we are talking about, a storage medium and plural, storage media. >> It's "the media", because that's a plural word, like "the news". > > That's not the sense of "media" that's relevant. That's the only case where media is a plural-word. Again, look it up: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/media >>>> Using "media" for a singular word just sounds weird for anyone knowing >>>> Latin. And FWIW it's also "Medium" in German when talking about one disk. >>> >>> Unfortunately it turns out that Deutschlish sounds weird to anyone >>> who knows English. >> >> Both languages have imported the word from Latin. I cited renowned >> dictionaries, >> you are basically citing your own and are being condescending because >> you are a native speaker and I'm not. > > Well, as it happens I also have a Masters degree in linguistics, so I > probably use unhelpful technical terms without noticing, but more > importantly I know the limitations of dictionaries. The first step is > to get straight what it is that you're trying to look up. Looking up > "medium" in the category sense is no more useful than looking up the > word that means "spiritualist". And unfortunately, itemisable chunks > of data-storage media are a new thing that people have only started > talking about in the past few decades (even now, people rarely need to > talk in terms of the generic cover-term "media"), and it's a new idea > that doesn't add a new headword for the dictionaries to define - it's > a new usage of the *plural* word "media", so it tends to fall between > the cracks. If you have a master's degree in linguistics, you should be able to provide sources as every scientist does. If I'm trying to convince someone in a physics argument, I also just don't say "I have a Diploma in Physics, so you are wrong", but I'm actually providing sources. >> Please cite a dictionary where "media" is used as a singular word >> not being in the context of "news". > > Again, your problem is that that isn't the right question. The only > sense of "media" that's commonly treated as singular is the > *colloquial* usage of "the news media", and that's the wrong one. The > sense that's relevant here is "storage media", which *has* no simple > singular form better than "item of media". Of course, it does. It's "one storage medium" and "many storage media", "one recording medium", "many recording media". > It isn't even a proper mass noun - words like "spaghetti" are > singulars without (itemising) plurals, while "media" is a plural with > no itemising singular. The bad news is, words like this usually end > up reinterpreting their plural form as a singular (cf. "data"), so as > far as conformance with Latin grammatical rules is concerned things > are only likely to get worse. I don't really understand your argument. If your claim that the singular for the word "medium" is not well defined, why is the Oxford dictionary doing it? If you have a refutable source that underlines your point, I'm more than interested to read it. But so far you have provided zero sources and your only argument is your degree. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
