On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 03:23 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Secondly, as you say, dictating what the plural in various languages > should be, borders on arrogance, but is probably just plain old > silliness.
Even more arrogantly speaking, the very notion of plural forms may well be just plain old silliness. Chinese has none, neither does Japanese and I belive neither does Korean. It seems the older (or may I say, the more mature) the language is, the less sintactic sugar it has. I can brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is but it seems Chinese have us all beat with respect to that. Besides, I would rather be silly than arrogant so I respect what the speakers think is right. If they say euros, that's euros to me when I am talking to them. In Rome, Romans should always be right. I may be more arrogant on English than others because English because, first of all, English no longer belongs to the UK and US; it belong to "us" with all lower cases. Second of all, it's my second native language (if I have such things as native languages). So I may even say what the textbooks and dictionaries state otherwise. I say Christianism even though spell checkers yell at me. To me it is one of the cults that should be postfixed with -ism. I consider the very lack of Academee Ingrais is the bliss rather a shortcoming. It is okay to "grok" or name a monkey kwijibo -- so long as it is spelled in Alphabet. English enjoys new words on-the-fly. What a pity Kanji on-the-fly is a taboo, at least on Unicode ;) Oh, I am a silly man so let me get back to silly-walking on the subject. So I go silly and let me ask you guys a silly question. How come ghoti, oops, fish, is fish no matter how many of them you count? And what is a singular form of sheep? shoop ? Dan the Silly Man
