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:2005-07-24
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.
Or are we both sticking to our own perceived meaning"? Are we Americans more taken in by the fiction that a corporation is really a "person" than are the British? I'm not claiming that we are or aren't. But it would not surprise me in the least.
Edited 2009-10-14 19:02 UTC
Member since:2007-03-06
Person or not, I'd say a corporation is still one singular entity, same as sport teams or political parties. They are all singular in Spanish too.
Just a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Member since:2005-11-11
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
Member since:2008-07-15
Actually, American English isn't even consistent on this, and it seems to depend on the area in which you were exposed to it. For example, where I was raised in Pennsylvania, most people used the British form of your expression, i.e. we'd say something like "AT&T are going to open up Skype on the iPhone for 3g access," but not everyone said it like that and there seems to be no officially correct way to handle it. Further, it gets even more interesting as even the people that interpret the company as a single entity will still use the pronoun "they" when referring to it. So, if they were to say, "Apple is really draconian with their hardware lockouts,, it would still turn into "they are really draconian with their hardware lockouts." If you were to treat the company as a singular entity, the correct pronoun would naturally be "it" not "they." When contracted, however, the singular form is always used, or very nearly so. Confused yet? 
Not surprising though, we Americans aren't consistent with anything except coming up with stupid laws and making asses of ourselves.
Member since:2006-03-18
Actually using "it" for a corporation or other collective entity is normal as well, though perhaps not as frequently used as 'they'. For example "Apple has had a breakout year with several new products contributing to strong revenue growth, if this continues, it is poised for explosive growth next year." But "they are" could definitely replace "it is" and actually "sounds" a bit more natural to me.
The use of "they" is more a sign of laziness than anything else - American's love "they" as the ultimate generic pronoun. But they can't bring themselves to say "they is" to force agreement.
I think the general rule is that Americans will attempt to interpret something as singular unless forced to do otherwise. If the noun or proper name at all hides the collective nature of the entity in question, we'll refer to it in the singular - "a number of people" pretty blatantly fails to hide the fact that it refers to more than one person, and thus gets the plural treatment.
Not surprising though, we Americans aren't consistent with anything except coming up with stupid laws and making asses of ourselves. 
Member since:2005-11-21
Member since:2007-11-04
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.
Actually I have a counter example. The LA Lakers are playing the NY Knicks tonight. Manchester United is playing Celtic Glasgow.
I think English is just one of the most inconsistent languages with respect to rules. My favourite example are in pronunciation. If you read a word you never know how to pronounce it (what's with "pronunciation" and "to pronounce" btw. just got caught by this), like Kansas and Arkansas (WTF??).
Sorry I'm German so I guess I'm biased, reading a word in German, you always know how to pronounce it. (Don't get me started on German grammar though
Member since:2006-03-18
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.