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
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
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 (the
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'
