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 FISe
Michel -- Of course, a countable quantity certainly inheres in one
aspect of information -- the Shannon version. But in English we
would not say 'many informations'. Rather 'much information' could
be used. 'Many' does have a countable sense of individual pieces,
while 'much' is a holistic l
Hi Michel,
You are correct about the use and concept of information in English.
General use of the term "information" refers to a fuzzy concept that is
continuously distributed from none to much, so the plural form
"informations" feels incorrect. Of course, in scientific discourses the
term has b
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.
> (
Dear FIS Colleagues,
For me, information is a typical English collective noun, with no plural in
"s", that subtends a number of individuals. These are designated by some
modifying phrase, as "a piece" of information. But I slightly disagree with
Guy, since I see the distribution not from zero (
Hello Michel,
It seems to me the situation with the use of information (in colloquial terms)
in Spanish is similar than that in French.
Of course, Spanish has many intrinsic details in its uses of words, verbs,
expressions, etc; depending of the country we are talking about.
In Peru, for insta
Michel
this is an interesting question and you can find a plausible answer for
if you take a look at the etymology of this word.
http://www.capurro.de/infoconcept.html
Latin "informatio" as a noun is used, as far as I know, only in the
singular and means giving form to something in a 'material'
