Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Oct 2009 16:00 UTC
In what is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, Michael Dell has started talking down netbooks. Dell made his comments about netbooks at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, and considering the impact of netbooks on manufacturers' bottom lines, it's really not that surprising.
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Member since:
2006-03-18
Actually British English and American English differ on this point, though I think the phrase you are picking on is a bad example of the phenomenon.
Brits stick to the meaning, not the word. For example, they would say 'British Telecom are developing a new service.' As 'British Telecom' does not mean a singular person, it's an organization of people, so therefore it's plural, thus the plural verb.
Americans on the other hand say 'British Telecom is developing a new service' - as the word itself represents a singular entity - the corporation British Telecom.
As for this example I'd guess Brits and Americans would actually be on the same page - as 'number of people' is the subject, the Brits will look at the meaning and say plural, the Americans, perhaps a bit inconsistently, will also see it as plural because it's a phrase which clearly spells out more than one person - it's a bit different than 'British Telecom' in that respect.
In Dutch, we look at the grammatical number of a noun to infer the grammatical number of the verb. In English, however, one looks at the meaning of the noun to infer the grammatical number of the verb.
"A number of people" is grammatically singular, and as such, we Dutch treat it as such. We would say: "a number of people is". In English, however, one looks at the meaning of the noun, and because of that, English people say "a number of people are".
Which, as a true holier-than-thou Dutchman, is something I find an epic cop-out.