I move we send all our kids to Australia for their education, where, judging by Ollie's standards, they do a far better job.

(It's not as if there's not enough room for them, after all.)

Surely that should be  האזחם  ?

Indeed! De la Rochefoucauld is supposed to have said something along the lines that "language is given to man to conceal his thoughts" and I have often thought that his remark might in part have been prompted by contemplation of the English language rather than his own. A Frenchman (who, incidentally, is not a musician) once said to me that anyone who can speak good English is capable of learning almost any language, even if that expertise in English has resulted from having been raised to speak that language; he added that English is not only the language of Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Burgess and Beckett but also the language of lawyers, politicians and musicologists, in that when a Frenchman says anything in French, all the listener usually has to do is understand what his words meant, whereas if an Englishman says something in English, the listener needs to consider what he may have meant, what he may not have meant, what nuances and combinations of nuances might have to be considered in terms of the specific emphases put on individual words and syllables and so on and so on - in other words, English has that wonderful characteristic epitomised, for example, by Lewis Carroll in Humpty Dumpty's "when I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean; neither more nor less". My own take on de la Rochefoucauld's dictum is that, if verbal language was indeed given to man to conceal his thoughts, then musical language was devised by man to conceal those thoughts that even he couldn't quite manage to conceal by means of verbal language, Enter the musicologist (but then I invoke another thread yet again, which I realise that I must not do here...)

Best,

Alistair

Ah.
They may do now, Tommo, but they didn't necessarily before English spelling was standardised only a matter of three hundred years or so ago. At the time they were being formed, written language hardly existed anyway, so these plurals came into being through spoken usage, and continue to exist due to survival of the fittest. In many cases, the final plural form is courtesy of whichever related language the most direct borrowing comes from, and let us not forget that before the days of mass commmunication and universal learning, conjugation and declension in everyday English differed widely across the country, and still survives to this day in dialect forms (I've mentioned before that in Dundee, the standard past tense of jump is jamped, or even jamp.)

Can I just check something i was taught.....

This = the one here
That = the one there

These = the ones here
Those = the ones there

So, "These ones here" is completely out, as it means "the ones here ones here"

sim, "Those ones there".  And as for "Those ones here".....

Tommo

OK, but I doubt you will ever find me saying "These ones" even so.

However, horror of horrors, I read an e-mail I sent the other day and found I had written "to" instead of "too".

Please shoot me.

Tommo

You hit on something historically sensitive there Tommo! And it's something that seems to have confounded those who reside within the higher echelons of lexicography too!

According to my COD, the entry under "one" reads: "Single and integral in number, neither none nor fractional nor plural..." (my italics)

Yet, in the very same dictionary (!) under "this and that" I read the following: "various ones..."!

So, it is singular (only?) or plural?!!

I think some of our "newer" inhabitants to these shores are - in their own helpful ways - clarifying some of these ambiguities for us.

Baz

Some may be new, others not so new - but there are still some who are even "newer". It was they to whom I referred.

Baz