At 04:35 PM 12/6/2008, Michel PETITJEAN wrote: >Hello FISers. > >Recently, one of my colleagues attract my attention on the following point. >In French, we often use information as a countable quantity, >so that we can write "informations". >In English, it seems that it is unusual, if not incorrect, to do that. >(1) Please can some English native FISers give their opinion about that ? >(2) Please can some FISers from non English-speaking countries tell us >how is the situation in their own language ?
Michel, folks, I haven't seen anything on the specific philosophical grammar of 'information' in English yet, so I will add some remarks. In English there are count nouns and mass nouns. Count nouns always take an adjective, like a South African, the Pope, a bicycle, and have plural forms. Mass nouns do not take an adjective when referred to singularly, such as water, gold, and humanity, and do not have a plural form. Mass terms refer to things not collectively per se, but in a distributed way. So we can say "Dogs are typically larger than cats", but we have to say "Gold is heavier than water." Mass terms can take an adjective, however, such as in "The gold in this ring is 90% pure." 'Information', in English, is a mass term. Note that count nouns and mass nouns can both have quantitative values, such as "There are ten dogs in this pen." and "The gold in this ring weighs 2 grams." However, typically, count nouns need no modifiers for their quantities, whereas mass nouns do, as in the previous examples. Information, as a mass term, follows this practice, and requires a measure, typically bits or entropy units, or something of the like. Furthermore, count nouns require something like 'the number of' in comparisons, for example, "The number of dogs in this pen is less than the number of cats in that pen." Contrast this with, "The information in this data is less than the information in the previous set of data." The phrase "the number of informations" is not grammatical in English, indicating that information is not a count noun. I my French is not sufficiently idiomatic to speak with any authority here, but I had thought that the mass/count distinction was pretty much the same, so I am surprised that 'informations' is grammatical. I think that there is a mass/count distinction in all languages (it is far to handy to not use), but grammatical markers are quite different (English articles, for example, are hard to translate). I should also point out that there are often hidden or suppressed grammatical differences that do not appear in the surface structure, or are apparently violated in surface structure. An example is that in English ships are feminine gender, even though there are no gender markers in English. I suppose the mass'count distinction could be hidden in some languages. It is possible that even in English the distinction is hidden or grammatically violated; I am not that expert on idiomatic English, either. The mass/count distinction I know mostly from work on identity, in which it is a very basic distinction that must be understood before one can go on. Count nouns are sometimes called 'sortals', with sortals applying to a period of time but not the whole period of existence of something being called 'phasal sortals'. There is no similar concept for mass terms, so one has to circumlocute, or else use implication. For example, if some clay is made into a statue of the Baby Goliath, and then squeezed down into a lump again, we can't really call the Baby Goliath a phase of the clay, but have to refer to the clay in terms of its being a lump: "That clay was a statue of the Baby Goliath, but now it is not." means, more precisely that that lump of clay was once a statue of the Baby Goliath, where 'lump' is a count noun, and a sortal. 'Data', incidentally, is often treated as a mass term, but it has a singular, 'datum'. So the rules are not hard and fast. Information and data are obviously closely linked, so one could have a grammatical nightmare if one wasn't careful, but idiomatic English speakers have no trouble (most of the time -- I could tell you a story of my boss at the Dominion Observatory, but I digress). Cheers, John ---------- Professor John Collier [EMAIL PROTECTED] Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 http://www.ukzn.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
