John --- you said:
>'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).
We increasingly see 'data' used in the singular by scientists,
as in 'this data'. Irritating as that is, I think it is an example
of he evolution of language in action.
STAN
>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 colli...@ukzn.ac.za
>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
>
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