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Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by cottsak on Thursday February 15, 2024 @02:31AM (#39380042)
you Americans need to think about your "LEGOs" problem
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by cgriswald on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:03AM (#39380220)
You really don’t want to go down this road. I have no problem starting a movement to get Americans to call them “LEGO’s” and you won’t be able to even suggest it’s wrong because it’ll just be a contraction of “LEGO parts,” “LEGO bricks,” and “LEGO sets.” (But feel free to lambast us over punctuation and quotation marks.)
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by emsixteen on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:53AM (#39380480)
This comment made me twitch involuntarily.
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by scoot on Thursday February 15, 2024 @05:30AM (#39381062)
That isn't how contractions in English work – you can't form a contraction from two nouns.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/con...

Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by drcongo on Thursday February 15, 2024 @07:10AM (#39381743)
Quite right, what's needed here is a portmanteau - Legarts
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by sgerenser on Thursday February 15, 2024 @01:44PM (#39386621)
I prefer Legricks. Dammit kids, pick up your legricks, I darn near killed myself!
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by atoav on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:33AM (#39380369)
How long do you thing that they will turn the already-plural "data" into the hyper-plural "datas"? Or has this already happened, I am too afraid to check.
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by andybak on Thursday February 15, 2024 @04:38AM (#39380748)
Datases.
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by thehappypm on Thursday February 15, 2024 @07:31AM (#39381900)
Nasty datases
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by Lio on Thursday February 15, 2024 @04:51AM (#39380825)
Datums?

...and lets not get into the "paninis" situation.

Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by schrodinger on Thursday February 15, 2024 @08:50AM (#39382650)
Eh, devils advocate: when a word becomes more of a loan word than just a usage of its proper origin, doesn’t it make sense to follow the new languages patterns?

Different grammatical situation of course but similar in spirit is “latte.” It just means milk in Italian and so in Italy you’d always say cafe latte. But in the states everyone knows it as the coffee drink (Starbucks probably to blame).

Same with salsa—just means sauce in Spanish—but it’s become an English word in the states at this point and taken a different meaning.

Entree being another more egregious example…

Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by Lio on Thursday February 15, 2024 @09:46AM (#39383263)
Entree really is a particularly egregious example because it's meaning is different in different English speaking countries.
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by FabHK on Thursday February 15, 2024 @10:38AM (#39383974)
I've seen (older) German texts where "Jesus" is declined as in Latin, eg "the apostles Jesu" (=of Jesus, genitive) or "We saw Jesum" (=accusative). Somewhat jarring. As you say - when do you stop?
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by nwatson on Thursday February 15, 2024 @07:52AM (#39382067)
Data is a mass/uncountable noun now (like meat) rather than a countable noun (like coin/coins). Turning it countable involves a helper noun like data point / data points.

"Datum?" Almost nobody uses that in the vernacular.

Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by atoav on Thursday February 15, 2024 @04:44PM (#39389416)
I have seen it used in more than one software project and I know IT/Software people (including myself) who use it.
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by layer8 on Thursday February 15, 2024 @12:48PM (#39385810)
Datae
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by beAbU on Thursday February 15, 2024 @02:44PM (#39387562)
Data /is/ plural. One datum, set of data.
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by atoav on Thursday February 15, 2024 @04:42PM (#39389393)
Exactly my point
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by EasyMark on Thursday February 15, 2024 @11:23AM (#39384619)
Imagine that, language and grammar changes from country to country. We must alert the king! Light the fires of Gondor!
Re:Show HN: Aldi's Price Map by JasonFruit on Thursday February 15, 2024 @12:56PM (#39385903)
LEGOs makes sense; a LEGO is an indivisible entity, of which you can have a certain number. Calling the material simply LEGO makes it sound like an undifferentiated mass, like sludge, or cheese.