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Re: USAGE: irregular plurals (was: minimal pair ...)

From:Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...>
Date:Sunday, October 27, 2002, 18:42
--- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > 1d) ?The cottages stood at the feet of the > mountains. > > That's probably what I'd say. It sounds funny, but > "foots of the > mountains" is even stranger sounding.
Maybe it's cos we don't have proper mountains in the East. While the Appalachians were mighty in their day, they can hardly be called mountains proper anymore. You hardly notice driving over them these days. ;)
> If it referred to a mountain > range, I'd probably just the "the foot of the > mountains"
I would understand mountains to be a collective in that case - a set of many individual mountains all having their own feet. Is that what you mean? Padraic. ===== il dunar-li c' argeont ayn politig; celist il pozponer le mbutheor ayn backun gras. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/