Author Topic: Plurals  (Read 2939 times)

Morbius

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Plurals
« on: January 30, 2012, 11:28:46 AM »
In yesterday's standard puzzle I unsuccessfully played the word 'lives'.  As a verb form, it's clearly not allowed.  However, it's also the plural of 'life' and it falls within the rules for plurals.  Shouldn't it be allowed on that basis?

mkenuk

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Re: Plurals
« Reply #1 on: January 30, 2012, 08:44:18 PM »
If you allow 'lives' (irregular plural of 'life'), you should also allow 'leaves' (irregular plural of 'leaf'), and maybe others.
MK

Morbius

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Re: Plurals
« Reply #2 on: January 31, 2012, 09:52:29 PM »
Indeed!  And the same principle seems to already apply in reverse for a word like 'does' which comes up regularly.  It's acceptable as a verb form but not as a plural.  This would seem to indicate that if a word is acceptable in one form, it counts, despite the fact that it may also be unacceptable in another form. 

mkenuk

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Re: Plurals
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2012, 03:51:18 AM »
Plurals are certainly a thorny problem as far a Chi is concerned: for some words, both forms are allowed (pant/pants and tong/tongs, for instance). The 'does' you mention is the irregular verb form (he does) rather than the plural of 'doe'. A couple of other 'f' ending words which might be included are 'shelf/shelve(s) and half/halve(s). I'm sure there are others. The judgment of Solomon indeed, or at least of Alan, is required in such cases!
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TRex

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Re: Plurals
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2012, 04:18:36 AM »
As I understand it (mayhap incorrectly), when a word is a plural which is not an 's' appended to the word (e.g. shelves, halves), it is accepted in the game; when it is a word that is more commonly thought of as something other than the plural which is an 's' appended to the word (e.g. does is more commonly thought of a form of the verb 'to do' than as the plural of the female deer; pants is more commonly thought of as an article of clothing ['pant' is not used for the clothing]), it is accepted in the game.

I believe it is the thinking of the pant/pants which made tongs acceptable, but I'm not certain.

The judgment of Solomon indeed, or at least of Alan, is required in such cases!

Indeed.

Alan W

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Re: Plurals
« Reply #5 on: February 01, 2012, 01:44:04 PM »
I'm not sure we've had precisely this issue raised before, Morbius. But, as MK and Trex suggest, I haven't felt able to rely on any cut and dried rules in deciding on some questions regarding plurals.

At one end of the spectrum is wolves. There is a rare verb wolve, meaning to behave like a wolf, or, of an organ, to make a wolf-like sound. Wolve is allowed in Chihuahua, but so is wolves, since anyone thinking of the word is almost certain to think of it as the plural of wolf.

I can't actually think of an example at the other extreme. That would be a word ending in -ves that is overwhelmingly used as an inflected form of a word ending in -ve, though it is also an obscure inflected form of a word ending in -f or -fe.

The case you raise, lives, is somewhere in the middle. If we allowed it, is there a danger that a lot of players, on seeing the word in a solution, would be bemused, thinking only of the verb (rhyming with gives) and not of the noun (rhyming with hives)? I'll come back to this question when I've had a chance to do some investigation. As MK mentioned, there would be a number of other words raising similar issues. In fact, there are some that almost certainly should be changed. I was planning to use wives as an example of a word that obviously should be allowed, until I discovered that it isn't! So I used wolves as my example. But it does seem wrong to rule out wives because of the rare verb wive.
Alan Walker
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Alan W

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Re: Plurals
« Reply #6 on: June 15, 2012, 01:17:59 PM »
I'm getting so far behind in replying to word suggestions that it's getting ridiculous. In fact, the forum software is asking me if I'm sure I want to reply to this topic, since it hasn't been posted in for more than 120 days!

However, I don't want to leave any proposal unanswered, so here goes.

The question is why we don't allow lives, as the plural of life, since it isn't a word made by adding S to the base word. The problem is that, as a verb, it is made by adding S to the base word, to live.

Checking in two major corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, I find both show the use of lives as a noun is about three times as frequent as its use as a verb. But both uses are very common - in the thousands or tens of thousands. I don't think these findings alter my initial feeling, that both uses are so common that the word should remain excluded.
Alan Walker
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