Plurals

Data versus stadiums, and the single panini

Mar 14th 2011, 17:55 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

AS I sat on a panel on language last week, someone delivered a familiar complaint: the use of "media" and "data" as singular nouns. What did I think about that, the questioner asked?  Someone else noted that I had used both forms of "data" that night already. Obviously, I'm confused myself.

I'm not particularly confused about the facts at hand, but how to think about them can be confusing. In Latin, datum is a singular noun that pluralises as data. We imported "data" and use it frequently in English; we use "datum" much less often. Since some people think of data as a mass, not as the plural of a thing you can count, they mentally file it with singular mass nouns like "water" and "oatmeal".  Doing so is hardly mouth-breathing stupidity, but it does violate the Latin rule.

But then again, who says we have to import foreign morphology into English when we import a word? The answer clearly isn't "always". The Economist, for example, pluralises "consortia", "data", "media", "spectra" and "strata" thus, but prescribes "conundrums", "forums", "moratoriums", "referendums" and "stadiums". (The rest here.) The rule is feel and convention, but it is arbitrary.

To those who say "but this is inconsistent," the reply is that we can't be fully consistent, and always import a word's full morphology from its host language. Media in Latin has the genitive form mediorum, but we don't say "the tendency of the mediorum to cover the sensational at the expense of the worthy makes me sick." Nor do we import even every other language's plural rules. Once upon a time an educated person was expected to know how Latin's plurals worked, and so we have a bias towards knowing Latin's rules. And we might extend that respect to well-known modern languages; the cognoscenti sniff at the sandwich-shop's offer of "a panini" (panini is plural, with the singular panino, in Italian). I think it's cute that people think the singular of tamales is tamale in Spanish (it's tamal). But this is just because I know Italian and Spanish.

But when confronted with a word from a less familiar language, I'm not so uppity. Should I know how to pluralise goulash, a Hungarian word (spelled gulyas), if I want to order three of them? No. I do what most people do, and apply English's rules: three goulashes, please. And this is what we do with the vast majority of our imports. There's no way to be perfectly consistent: I can't learn how the  Illinois language pluralises things if I want to ask for more than one pecan at a time, just because "pecan" came from that language. So we're stuck with a few compromises, inevitably. De gustibus non est disputandum. 

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/03/foreign_imports_english