Saturday Morning Breakfast Plurals
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SMBC from a couple of days ago:
The mouseover title: "I settled this years ago and it's pronounced hyeef."
The aftercomic:
The next day, we learn about the invisible hand of the market making out with the long arm of the law, post-apocalyptically.
And after that, we see how Facebook will improve our user experience.
GH said,
May 3, 2025 @ 1:44 am
What is Language Log's take on this one?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2477622-tom-gauld-on-grammatical-voices-for-use-in-scientific-writing/
Mark Liberman said,
May 3, 2025 @ 4:18 am
@GH: "What is Language Log's take on this one?"
They got active/passive right, and the rest of it is clever:
unekdoud said,
May 3, 2025 @ 5:20 am
"You don't pluralize filenames" Hold my beers.jpg while I scroll through several indices.html to download my tracks1.mp3
Jonathan Smith said,
May 3, 2025 @ 10:25 am
Speaker says "gifs" in first frame, so presumably by "you don't pluralize filenames" he means "you *do* pluralize file *extensions* but regularly as opposed to analogically based on irregular [or simply random] plurals of one's choosing"
Richard Hershberger said,
May 3, 2025 @ 12:35 pm
The running debate in baseball is what is the plural of RBI. The silly argument is that is stands for both the singular and the plural: "He had one RBI in the game" vs. "He had three RBI in the game." The argument explicitly is that the plural marker is buried in the initialism, and so in invisible. Most people roll their eyes and say "He had three RBIs in the game" and go about their day, but you can find some people who carefully avoid this.
Richard Hershberger said,
May 3, 2025 @ 12:36 pm
To add for non-baseball people, "RBI" stands for "run[s] batted in."
Cervantes said,
May 3, 2025 @ 12:41 pm
Is it doofuses or doofi? I always had trouble with the Latin plurals.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 3, 2025 @ 1:38 pm
@ Cervantes, it's both, if German Doofi, pl. Doofis, diminutive -i (dummy) is enough to suggest that's what student slang took to backform a Latinate ending –us. It could, of course, be a different formation, say ox, such that dumb[f] oxen would be the correct plural (in that case, the aspirate has to be blamed on Celtic).
Incidently, the fricative is not voiceless in Doofi "idiot", unlike doof "duh (viz. *dough?). It's pronounced HYEEVES.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 3, 2025 @ 4:14 pm
@Richard Hershberger: Does anyone argue for RsBI? I would say in support of the most-people-rolling-their-eyes position that the plural (if you're pedantic) of "attorney general" is "attorneys general" but the plural of the initialism "AG" is "AG's" (or "AGs" if you prefer it that way).
Is there a dispute about the plural of HBP?
Jon said,
May 3, 2025 @ 11:11 pm
I knew someone who insisted that one should say, for Members of Parliament, Ms P instead of MPs.
No-one was persuaded.
Richard Hershberger said,
May 4, 2025 @ 7:30 am
RsBI: I assume all positions are supported by someone, but the plural "RBI" is the form one finds fairly often in the wild.
Chris Button said,
May 4, 2025 @ 8:38 am
@ Richard Hershberger
RBI in baseball is in the same linguistic situation as LBW (leg before wicket) in cricket.
Chris Button said,
May 4, 2025 @ 8:43 am
Although I assume LBWs is the only option there (I don't follow cricket, so can't really comment)
Anonymous said,
May 4, 2025 @ 9:46 am
@Chris Button, as someone who does follow cricket, it's not common that one has to speak of multiple legs before wicket (as you're out whether you have one or both legs before the wicket). What you *can* talk about is multiple "leg before wicket" (or leg-before-wicket) dismissals, and in that case LBWs is indeed used.
Chris Button said,
May 4, 2025 @ 11:10 am
There are actually probably loads of these quirks in acronyms. Sticking just to sports, how about DNF (did not finish) in F1 races? Would that then be multiple "did not finishes"?
Jason Stokes said,
May 5, 2025 @ 1:18 am
The writer had to search long and hard for that .man to .men joke, since .man files are either Unix man pages, that are almost never shared among users directly (rather, they may be in their markup form, .roff) or .man files from the CAD software AutoGDS, which is a pretty obscure reference.
David Marjanović said,
May 5, 2025 @ 7:32 am
A herd of .docxen! I like that.
That's not a diminutive, it's very specifically the nickname suffix. Some kinds of German do use the actual diminutive suffixes, -chen & -lein or various cognates, to form nicknames, but others don't, and -i is not used to shrink things.
Same in English (dummy, Charlie) and Hungarian.
What aspirate?
Yves Rehbein said,
May 6, 2025 @ 11:19 am
There is exactly one aspirate in "dumb[f] oxen". It's not phonemic, but it must have been there, based on my reconstruction. Proto-Germanic *dumbaz "dumb" reflects aspirate PIE *bʰ (Wiktionary), sounds like an insult, to which compare Proto-Celtic *bāus, Proto-Brythonic *bʉx, Latinate bos, bovis. Meanwhile Proto-Celtic *ɸ English f) was deleted and had to go through a stage of aspiration as well.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 6, 2025 @ 11:23 am
Correction: Proto-Celtic *ɸ [from] PIE *p ([where from] English f).
Angle brackets don't play nice with html mark-upp.
Philip Taylor said,
May 6, 2025 @ 1:39 pm
< is your friend, Yves.
David Marjanović said,
May 6, 2025 @ 5:30 pm
Oh, are you trying to say dumm and doof are cognates? They're not. Doof is the Low German cognate of taub, which has the same meaning as its English cognate, deaf. This is the reason why doof is, in places where it's native, declined with -/v/-, the cognate of High German -/b/-, instead of with the /f/ it gets from syllable-final fortition (something not all kinds of High German even have).
Dumm looks like a s mobile variant of stumm, which means "mute" just as non-American dumb does.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 9, 2025 @ 1:47 pm
*dumbaz and *daubaz are related by Wiktionary, though this not certain, maybe imitatitve, duh. Dumme / taube Nuss are perfectly synonym, too, for me at least.
There might even be evidence of mobile s in dumb AF /s