Hi all, I have a question to those among us for whom English is a first language.
I have been using the Grammarly plugin for Chrome these past few weeks, which checks for grammatical errors as I type, and it kept highlighting "trainings" when used in the plural form of the noun. Today I decided to investigate why and found that training is a gerund, meaning a verb used as a noun and these do not have a plural form. Some feedback I found online was: "I would agree with the other answers here in principle (training has no real plural form), although with this word I believe we are seeing language change in action. I work in international development and among my colleagues, “trainings” is extremely common. Not all who use this plural form are native English speakers, but many are. I used to insist on “training sessions” but feel it’s a losing battle." "In most senses of the word, "training" is a verb (I am training), a participle (a verb acting as an adjective: training video), or a gerund (a verb acting as a noun: training is a lot of work) In these cases, there is no plural form (since gerund are abstract and have no plural). If you force "training" into being a finite noun, something that is countable, then you could have "one training", "two trainings", but most English speaker will give you a weird look if you say that." In principle I guess all of this is right, but since we used "trainings" quite frequently on the mailing list already I wondered if that part about getting weird looks is still correct, or if language has indeed moved on already. If this is indeed weird, do we need to agree on how this should be phrased in anything official like the website etc. ? Best regards, Sönke
