People who think it's fine to say "amount of people."

The word people isn't always plural

wait yeah it is

he's saying it should be the number of people

I understand, but there's really nothing 'wrong' with it, much like ending a sentence with a preposition. You can say it and everyone knows what you mean; there is no potential flaw with the sentence you're saying.

pacino wrote:I understand, but there's really nothing 'wrong' with it, much like ending a sentence with a preposition. You can say it and everyone knows what you mean; there is no potential flaw with the sentence you're saying.

Anarchy. Next you're going to say that Saddam Hussein was hung.

Well, maybe he was. I've only ever seen him in his underwear.

pacino wrote:I understand, but there's really nothing 'wrong' with it, much like ending a sentence with a preposition. You can say it and everyone knows what you mean; there is no potential flaw with the sentence you're saying.

There's a difference between 'wrong, but it doesn't bother me' and right. The sentence "the amount of people who agree with Pacino is disheartening" is wrong. You don't find it annoying, I do. The sentence "Pacino's views on grammar make me want to throw up" is grammatically correct. It's an old wives tale that you can never end a sentence with a preposition.

You seem to be disagreeing with the very premise of this thread: that there's such a thing as incorrect grammar and that people can rightly be annoyed by it.

Data are

"throw up" is a compound verb, not prepositional phrase

alot

MrsVox wrote:

phatj wrote:I'm something of a grammar pedant, and I know when to use each, but I frequently get "it's" and "its" mixed up unless I'm very careful.

I understand that "it's" is a contraction of "it is" and that's why it has an apostrophe. However, "its" is the possessive form of it -- why doesn't it have an apostrophe as well? I can't readily think of other possessives ending in "s" that don't have an apostrophe.

Anybody?

In the case, and with other contractions, the apostrophe is used to indicate the absence of a letter/letters. (That's the rule I use to remember).

Also, "his", "hers", "theirs", and "ours" -- all posessive pronouns, like "its".

So, I am six years late to this party, but here you go:

Old English, like Latin and many other older Indo-European languages, and modern German to this day, is a highly inflected language: that is, rather than allowing sentence order and other syntactical cues to determine the grammatical function of its nouns (subject, object, etc.), Old English used specialized endings to denote noun syntax (case).

So, let's use as an example the word "farmer." In modern English, "farmer" retains its form, regardless of how it is used in a sentence:

The farmer milked the cow. (subject)

The salesman spoke to the farmer. (object)

The word "farmer" remains the same, despite its changing use in the context of the sentence.

In Old English, and in Latin, the word farmer would change form in each of these cases. In Latin, the word for "farmer" is agricola. If you were using the word for farmer as the subject of a sentence - i.e., in the nominative case - that's how it would appear: agricola. However, if you wanted to use it as the direct object of the sentence, you would need to add an "m" to it: "agricolam":

Agricola amat puellam. (The farmer loves the girl.)

BUT

Puella amat agricolam. (The girl loves the farmer.)

Notice "puella" - girl - changes too - in the first sentence it is the direct object, so it appears as "puellam."

There is a lot more to this, as there are 7 possible declensions of every noun in Latin (the nominative and accusative, as above, as well as the dative, the genitive, the ablative, the locative, and the vocative), and nouns in Latin have genders like they do in modern Romance languages, and there are five full declensional patterns to consider (so there are 7 x 5 = 35 different noun endings to memorize), but this is the basic idea. At this point, I am sure you can see why Latin died - it gets very cumbersome - but, as an aside, the one advantage to all of this one might cite is that word order is not determinative of meaning in Latin, and thus you can arrange things however you like:

Puella agricolam amat. (How the Romans probably actually would have written this)
Amat puella agricolam.
Agricolam amat puella.

All mean the same thing: The girl loves the farmer. If you did this in English you would get some nonsensical stuff, or just some weird syntax. Here are all three Latin sentences above, rendered in the same word order as the Latin. You can see how things get muddled:

The girl the farmer loves.
Loves the girl the farmer.
The farmer loves the girl (obviously means something completely different than what is intended).

So, Latin (and other highly inflected languages) has some flexibility that non-inflected languages do not have.

Back to why we have "its" - and "his" and "hers" and "theirs":

We usually think of only two noun "cases" in modern English - subjective and objective - but most earlier languages distinguished five or more: the nominative (subjective), the genitive (possessive), the dative (the indirect object), the accusative (the object), and the others could vary - in Latin, for example, there is the ablative (no real correlative in modern English - it's the use of a noun with certain prepositions, principally by, with, and from). Here is the word "farmer," as a singular noun, in its five most common cases:

Nominative (subject)= agricola
Genitive (possessive)= agricolae
Dative (indirect object) = agricolae
Accusative (direct object) = agricolam
Ablative (by/with/from the...) = agricola (though this is different from the above Agricola, as it ends with a 'long', rather than a 'short' A in Latin)

In modern English, we'd just use "farmer" in every case:

The salesman gave the farmer the plough. (Indirect object)

The salesman brought the plough for the farmer. (ablative)

In every case, that is, except one: the "genitive" (possessive). And it is that "genitive" - the possessive - we need to pay attention to. We CAN indicate possessive without the possessive ending:

The field of the farmer

But we almost always use it:

The farmer's field

That "apostrophe s" that we use as a possessive is essentially a vestige of an otherwise forgotten system of declensional noun endings in English. It derives from a particular declension of Old English. The Old English word for farmer, for example, is "æcerceol" (in the nominative, i.e., subjective case). But when you need to use a possessive form of "farmer" in Old English you use this form: "æcerceoles." That extra "-es" added to the noun stem "æcerceol" is the origin of today's "apostrophe s" for possessives.

The one place left in modern English where you can much more clearly see the old declensional system of Old English having survived down the ages is in our pronouns. Here is the masculine singular pronoun, in three cases - nominative, objective, and possessive: he, him, his. The "h-" stem remains the same, and the declensional endings change to indicate case. Same with the feminine pronoun: she, her, hers. In both cases, you can see the possessive ending - "s" - is the same.

"It" is something of an exception, in that its nominative and accusative (i.e., objective) forms are the same (that is, "it"), but actually, that has precedence in older languages: for example, in Latin, neuter nouns - because Latin has masculine, feminine, and neuter - often exhibit no difference between the nominative and accusative forms. The word for war in Latin is neuter - "bellum" - and that is its form in both the nominative and the accusative. However, in the possessive, the word is "belli." And, in English, "it" is the form of the singular neuter personal pronoun in the nominative and accusative cases, but "its" is its form in the possessive case - there is that "s" again.

So, the "-s" we see indicative of possessives in English, whether in our pronouns - his, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs - or added to our nouns - farmer's, child's, dog's - is kind of like the appendix of the English language, an old remnant from a dead earlier form of the language.

This leads to the obvious question: why the apostrophe? it's a typographical quirk, and its origins are, from what I've ever read, somewhat obscure. You'll occasionally hear people say that the apostrophe is there to indicate the removal of the word "his" from a possessive phrase: that, in days gone by, people would say "the farmer his book," but that this got shortened to "the farmer's book," and although no one even remembers the missing 'his' anymore, the apostrophe is still there as some kind of a lonely memorial to its former presence.

This is incorrect.

In fact, there is some evidence that writers - even writers from several hundred years ago - started retro-expanding phrases like "the farmer's book" INTO "the farmer his book," because they didn't know why there was an added "s" to a noun when you were indicating possession and thought that this would somehow explain it and be more formal. Indeed, the practice of using an apostrophe when spelling a possessive may have arisen from that confusion/practice. But rest assured, that "s" - both in "farmer's" and in "its" - is the same "s," a last remaining inflection in our modern language that has mostly done away with that system.

Even though, as should be evident from above, this is a subject I happen to know a LOT about, this is exactly how I feel about grammar peevishness (by Stephen Fry):

ashton wrote:

pacino wrote:I understand, but there's really nothing 'wrong' with it, much like ending a sentence with a preposition. You can say it and everyone knows what you mean; there is no potential flaw with the sentence you're saying.

There's a difference between 'wrong, but it doesn't bother me' and right. The sentence "the amount of people who agree with Pacino is disheartening" is wrong. You don't find it annoying, I do. The sentence "Pacino's views on grammar make me want to throw up" is grammatically correct. It's an old wives tale that you can never end a sentence with a preposition.

You seem to be disagreeing with the very premise of this thread: that there's such a thing as incorrect grammar and that people can rightly be annoyed by it.

Grammatical and spelling practices are not objective truths - they are practices, and when the "rules" of English grammar were written in the 18th century (note: long after the appearance of modern English), they were done so in a way that essentially evaluated how a particular, aristocratic class wrote and spoke, and combined those practices with the rules for composing classical Latin (which itself is a very highly affected - rather than every day and natural - form of that language) to come up with a set of "rules" for English. The "rules," in other words, are much more an expression of who was in power than what is "right" - the rules are a codification of the language practices of a particular group of social elite, who were "right" by virtue of their wealth and power, rather than for any fundamental correctness of their form of expression.

mozartpc27 wrote:

MrsVox wrote:

phatj wrote:I'm something of a grammar pedant, and I know when to use each, but I frequently get "it's" and "its" mixed up unless I'm very careful.

I understand that "it's" is a contraction of "it is" and that's why it has an apostrophe. However, "its" is the possessive form of it -- why doesn't it have an apostrophe as well? I can't readily think of other possessives ending in "s" that don't have an apostrophe.

Anybody?

In the case, and with other contractions, the apostrophe is used to indicate the absence of a letter/letters. (That's the rule I use to remember).

Also, "his", "hers", "theirs", and "ours" -- all posessive pronouns, like "its".

So, I am six years late to this party, but here you go:

*SNIP*

Thanks!

phatj wrote:

mozartpc27 wrote:

MrsVox wrote:

phatj wrote:I'm something of a grammar pedant, and I know when to use each, but I frequently get "it's" and "its" mixed up unless I'm very careful.

I understand that "it's" is a contraction of "it is" and that's why it has an apostrophe. However, "its" is the possessive form of it -- why doesn't it have an apostrophe as well? I can't readily think of other possessives ending in "s" that don't have an apostrophe.

Anybody?

In the case, and with other contractions, the apostrophe is used to indicate the absence of a letter/letters. (That's the rule I use to remember).

Also, "his", "hers", "theirs", and "ours" -- all posessive pronouns, like "its".

So, I am six years late to this party, but here you go:

*SNIP*

Thanks!

Anytime!

TomatoPie wrote:Data are

Grammatically correct but sounds funny? I agree.

Datums are

Why won't words with friends let me play pho? It's at least as much an English word as xi.

Werthless wrote:

TomatoPie wrote:Data are

Grammatically correct but sounds funny? I agree.

Technically correct, if you think Latin applies.

If you regard data as a collective noun, then mebbe not.

The forest are full of wildlife?

I think you can treat "data" as either a plural or a mass noun.