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Hey, first time poster here. Not sure if I should put this here, but it seemed a good a place as any. I love the daily emails, however today's (14/4/08) contained something I have always had a pet peeve about. This week's words are created using combining forms. What are combining forms? You can think of them as the Legos of language. Now I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the term is just "Lego", singular and plural. Like "sheep". Firefox spell checker agrees with me, so I can't be too far off. Sorry, it's just that I've always been slightly annoyed whenever someone says "Legos" instead of "Lego". As I said, I love the emails, keep up the good work! -Doc
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Carpal Tunnel
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Welcome to AWAD. Check around at local pet shops. There may be some nearby that have peeve chow for your pets.
Language cannot successfully be legislated, nor can it be controlled merely by the supply side of commerce. New words introduced into languages are almost invariably regular, whatever they may have been in the minds of the parents of those words. My advice is to get used to it. Legos is like peas or cherries only the other way around.
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old hand
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New words introduced into languages are almost invariably regular, whatever they may have been in the minds of the parents of those words. My advice is to get used to it. Legos is like peas or cherries only the other way around. Did you mean irregular?
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enthusiast
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New words introduced into languages are almost invariably regular, whatever they may have been in the minds of the parents of those words. My advice is to get used to it. Legos is like peas or cherries only the other way around. Did you mean irregular? I'm still mastering English, but his comment made sense to me with the word "regular". If a new word comes in, it is easy to see how it might follow the regular rules, in this case the one that says English makes words into plurals by adding "s". That's what I thought Faldage was saying anyway. I'm going to see if I did get this right. If we use a made-up word like that pieriansipist thing that Raul asked about, I'm guessing that Faldage is saying the plural would be pieriansipists, the adjective would be pieriansipistic, the adverb would pieriansipistically, and so on. Maybe whoever made it up might say different but if the word ever did make it for real it would work the way the majority of English words work. Now to see if I did comprehend Faldage's words properly.
Last edited by latishya; 04/14/08 12:36 PM.
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Actually, legos is the singular; the plural is legoi. The form the hoi legoi is to be eschewed. FWIW: the company name Lego is from the Danish leg godt 'play well'; the main product of the company is Lego bricks.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Hoi legoi ! Lego whith a capital L ,L! In English you can do it with an s because the noun comes at the end of the sentence:
To play with legos. We can't do it very well. Met Legos spelen.
The upfollowing ss's would become one anyway.
Last edited by BranShea; 04/15/08 07:01 AM. Reason: typo
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Latishya has got it right. Pieariansipist might not be a good example since it follows the rules that would be normal for words ending in the suffix -ist. A better example might be mongoose. The temptation is to form the plural as mongeese; this is incorrect but will probably be seen in informal use. Mongooses outgoogles mongeese 170,000 to 34,500. It's more commonly seen in verbs. For example, the verb grandstand has as its past tense grandstanded and not *grandstood. It derives not from the verb stand but from the noun grandstand.
To expand on my peas and cherries examples, they were originally mass nouns, English pease and Anglo-Norman cherise. They were both re-analyzed as count plurals and the singulars were back-formed, giving us the count nouns pea and cherry respectively. Getting back to Legos, given Nuncle's revelation that the correct term for the little thingies themselves is LegoŽ bricks Lego is actually functioning as an adjective. Since we have nouned it we can make the plural any-dang-thing we want.
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and, as the phrase 'let's play with our Lego' probly sounds a bit odd to a kid, I've always heard Legos, and never once have I been inclined to correct them.
-ron o.
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old hand
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Yes, thanks Latishya, in hindsight it's clear. Because Faldage said " are regular" I was fooled into thinking that referred to their state when coming into the language, which didn't make sense to me. I see now that he meant they become regularised, being slotted by English speakers into the existing framework of forming regular parts of speech. That's to be expected. However, I still don't see the need to pluralise it whatever its orgin may be. tsuwm said "and, as the phrase 'let's play with our Lego' probly sounds a bit odd to a kid, I've always heard Legos, and never once have I been inclined to correct them." I've never heard or used Legos, and I would say to a kid "let's get your Lego out," not Legos. It's a collective noun like sheep or fish, describing the whole collection of bricks and other little bits that comprise a kid's store of Lego, or the type of thing they are, not the individual component. This is true even if it has become more than just a brand name and now applies generically to other brands of click-together bricks. Why not say "look at the sheeps" or "there's lots of grains in that silo"? It's the same kind of word. Also, whilst I appreciate zmjexhd's amusing suggestion of Hellenizing the ending (and wish I'd said it first  ), of course it is only accidentally the same ending as a regular Greek singular masculine noun (and only in the Anglicized plural), and it makes more sense to give a Danish loan word an English ending than a Greek one. However, in this case I don't think it should be given any plural ending because it is already a collective noun. So although I don't share the peeve of the OP (I could care less about Lego), I think he is technically correct.
Last edited by The Pook; 04/15/08 12:09 AM.
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> "let's get your Lego out,"
and the poor kid would think that he only had one brick.
how many horse you got?
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