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We do the same thing with "team" (My team is the best vs my team are the best). Hard to spin that into a tinfoilhat reflection on the state of things in our society. We just treat mass nouns differently from the Brits (typically, not as an ironclad rule, see below)


Lakers. That S on the end means plural. "The 5 starting Lakers are" etc, as it should be. And your Manchester U example is not typical of British English. Google returns more results for "Manchester United are" than "Manchester United is"


This happens when the language takes in words from many different sources. It's a Germanic language with a large amount of French vocabulary thanks to the Normans, with Viking influences and borrowings from all over the place thanks to the British Empire among other things. You're not wrong of course; the pronunciation is weird.


The Brits like to say (and spell) "pronounciate" since they, like you, feel it more logical. But I don't hear them saying "enounciation"; it's still "enunciation" like it always was.

At any rate, "Pronunciation" is derived from the Latin "pronuntiationem", so there is a history of the second syllable having just the U. It's "pronounce" gaining that second "o" that doesn't make sense.


Oh sure you do. If you know the rules. "ch" is pronounced differently in "ich" and "auch" for example. You have to know when to roll an "r" (or treat it as a voiced "h") and when to basically pretend it isn't there (drei vs Mutter). But yeah, if you know the rules it's a lot more consistent than English

@Thom: Regarding "a number of people" though, it's pretty much a synonym for "many people". It's referring to people in the plural, and I'm fine with treating it as a plural

Edited 2009-10-15 06:40 UTC