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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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fall asleep
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
Unless they do. Also, they *do take the, as in, "Will you have the soup or the salad?"
I never said they didn't take 'the'. It might be more precise to say words can have countable and uncountable meanings. Thus soup meaning the edible liquid is uncountable, while if 'soup' means kinds of the liquid or servings of the liquid, then it is countable.
The supermarket sells a wide variety of soups.
Three soups and two salads, please.
Similarly, if 'smoke' means cigarette it is countable. If 'smoke' refers to the vapour given off by burning substances it is not.
Give us a smoke, will you?
Smoke from the forest fires could be seen from many miles away.
Sheep and deer are both countable. It just so happens that the form of the singular and plural are the same.
A sheep (deer) was grazing.
Six sheep (deer) were running across the field.
Bingley
Bingley
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Wordwind found my post on the chiasmus site needlessly obscure, and asked for an explanation by pm. She thinks my reply might be of general interest and suggested I post it to the board. Here it is:
Sorry, I didn't mean to be obscure. Chiasmi is fine. The problem is the parallel with octopus. Chiasmos is a Greek 2nd declension noun, plural chiasmoi, Latinised and Anglicised as chiasmi. Fine. No problem. Unfortunately pous (foot -- the final element of octopus) is a 3rd declension noun. The plural is podes (think of all the pod words with foot meanings). So if one wants to use the Greek plural it would have to be octopodes. Better by far to treat it as an ordinary English noun -- octopuses.
Bingley
Bingley
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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far better ... octopuses. Ooh, no I like octopodes better it sounds more octopus movementish to me.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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octopodes
Yeahbut®, is it OCK tuh poads, or ock TAH puh deez?
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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ock TAH puh deez in the Antipodes but OCK tuh poads elsewhere
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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ock TAH puh deez in the Antipodes and also for Euripedes.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Nope, it wouldn't be "ock TAH puh deez" up here, you would have to replace that "AH" with our favourite, (almost our only) vowel, a schwa. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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replace that "AH" with … a schwa
A *stressed schwa!?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>A *stressed schwa!?
Sure, up here they're all stressed from being so overworked.
Aks shirley, we're known for rising intonation, and, IMHO, we don't stress that syllable. Having said the word dozens of times in the last few minutes, I'm stil convinced it's a schwa there - the word comes out like "an-tschwa-pscwha-DEEZ.
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