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Re: About linguistic (in)tolerance

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Monday, March 29, 1999, 3:28
Mathew Willoughby wrote:
> All the time. "Pass me that die," or "Where did that die roll to?" > For a single grain of rice, however, I usually say > "a grain of rice" or "a peice of rice" Rie just sounds a little > bit too much like rye.
Well, I think that there's two other reasons. One, "die" is an actual word, whereas "rie" isn't. Secondly, even if "die" weren't a word, dice are fairly large objects, which tend to occur in small groups (i.e., it's a count noun, as opposed to a mass noun), and are viewed as groups of individual items, thus a distinction between singular and plural is reasonable. That is, you view it as 2 dice, while with rice, it's a mass item, it's rare that you'd ever need to refer to a single grain of rice. Also, both dice and rice have a /s/, rather than the normal plural /z/, thus if the word "die" didn't already exist, it's unlikely to be created. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor