Re: About linguistic (in)tolerance

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.

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