Talk:superplural

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Latest comment: 2 years ago by Equinox
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@Fay Freak I corrected "an other" to "another"; I now see you reverted this previously. However, "an other" just looks wrong in English. You may want to consider an alternative like "a different one". Equinox 00:38, 16 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Equinox: Funny how things can look wrong while they aren’t. Anyway, I wasn’t too sure it isn’t (save the reasonable linguistic use, which nonetheless is inspired by it) some hokum by philosophers, as philosophy uses to be problems caused by senselessly abusing language, and I put the London gloss because the word has apparently only spread in a small academic circle in London—all I found. The citations exactly show that. The publishers, the journals published in, and the academic stations of the authors. Where it was about an Australian language it wasn’t an Australian but somebody from London. Fay Freak (talk) 00:48, 16 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, well, I'm not sure that a concept being local to a region merits a gloss. Suppose that someone in California invents a new sport of "dogboarding" where you skateboard with your dog. Maybe only Californians are talking about this, but if anybody else referred to it, they would presumably use the same word too. Glosses are not for sneering at cliques. Equinox 00:54, 16 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Regarding "an other" looking wrong: I mean it looks and sounds alien to native English speakers and so should be avoided when we write definitions in English. You would probably only see "an other" in sociology texts referring to someone who is "other" (a minority, etc.). Whether you feel technically more correct than the native speaker is not really relevant. Equinox 00:57, 16 August 2021 (UTC)Reply