Re: CHAT: Team Names

John Cowan wrote:

> Until very recent years, all professional sports teams in the U.S.
> had names plural in form, either ordinary nouns or deadjectival nouns.
> "Athletics" (not *"Athletes"), "Rockies" (presumably short for "Rocky
> Mountaineers"), and "Supersonics" are the only ones in the latter
> category that come to mind.  Naturally, all these forms take plural
> agreement.
>
> Now we have teams named by ordinary singular nouns such as "Jazz",
> "Magic", and "Heat", and there is considerable tension in sports writing
> between singular agreement (grammatically called for, and natural
> in American writing when applied to collectives: "the government is",
> "the jury decides", etc.) and plural agreement (very unnatural,
> but uniform with other team names).
I was thinking how this apply in Colombia.  Most of the Professional Football
(Soccer) teams use singular in their names (those not known by the city), and
even those recognized by the city or some other place or use a plural name use
a singular article in the common name: el Santafe', el Ame'rica, el Cali, el
Juniors, el Once (formerly el Cristal), el Nacional, etc.  Even "Los
Millonarios" are commonly called without article or using the singular article:
"Millonarios" or "El Millonarios".  When put in a phrase one would say
  "Millonarios gano' el partido" - Millonarios won-SING the match.

The Professional Basketball leage is recent.  One of the teams is called
"Piratas" in plural an you would probably heard on radio:
  "Los Piratas ganaron el partido" - The Piratas won-PL the match.


--
Carlos