Talk:double-u
Latest comment: 4 months ago by GareginRA in topic double-u's
double-u's Plural of w Microsoft® Encarta® 2009
--Backinstadiums (talk) 10:20, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
- @Backinstadiums, that would make more sense. Double-ues breaks all rules of plural construction. It should either be considered an exception and be put in Category:English_nouns_with_irregular_plurals or just get discarded. --GareginRA (talk) 00:11, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
- So I checked some sources and there do seem to be publications stating that Ues is the plural of U and Double-ues is the plural of Double-u. They also mention Aes, which is also a non-standard plural. --GareginRA (talk) 01:04, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
- "double-u's" would also be irregular. kwami (talk) 10:59, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Kwamikagami, well, one could argue that u in double-u is more of a symbol than a morpheme of any sort, but it actually just refers to the letter name U (not to be confused with the letter itself). So the real question is why ues, aes, ees and oes are the established plurals of their corresponding letter names, which, by the way, don't have extra ees in singular. I suppose, they were established long before the modern rules, but I might be wrong. --GareginRA (talk) 20:12, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
- Sure, you could write "U's and V's" like you do "3's and 4's", and that's far more common. But if you want the equivalent of "threes and fours", the extra 'e' is needed for clarity. It would seem these have never been common written words, so people are unlikely to understand "as", "is" or "us" as referring to the letters, and "es" and "os" are not much better. For one thing, people would almost certainly read them with short vowels. For a long vowel, we need an extra 'e', and that means -es, unless we want to change the spelling entirely ("ayes" etc.). kwami (talk) 03:25, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
- That's right, but on the other hand, we don't write ae and Ie not to confuse them with the words a and I, but maybe that's just harder to do than with "as", "is" and "us". So, what fascinates me is that this pluralization is so logical that it can barely be called non-standard, and yet it is, as unnoticed as it was (even w:English plurals doesn't mention it). --GareginRA (talk) 05:00, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
- Well, one difference is that singular "a" and "i" are pronounced the same as the more common words, but the plurals are pronounced differently. It's much more difficult to understand a word, or it's at least more jarring, if you hear it wrong in your head when you see it.
- They're also the only common nouns spelled as a single letter, so it's not unreasonable for them to have a special plural rule, rather like the pronoun 'I' has a special capitalization rule. kwami (talk) 07:37, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
- Right. --GareginRA (talk) 19:36, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
- That's right, but on the other hand, we don't write ae and Ie not to confuse them with the words a and I, but maybe that's just harder to do than with "as", "is" and "us". So, what fascinates me is that this pluralization is so logical that it can barely be called non-standard, and yet it is, as unnoticed as it was (even w:English plurals doesn't mention it). --GareginRA (talk) 05:00, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
- Sure, you could write "U's and V's" like you do "3's and 4's", and that's far more common. But if you want the equivalent of "threes and fours", the extra 'e' is needed for clarity. It would seem these have never been common written words, so people are unlikely to understand "as", "is" or "us" as referring to the letters, and "es" and "os" are not much better. For one thing, people would almost certainly read them with short vowels. For a long vowel, we need an extra 'e', and that means -es, unless we want to change the spelling entirely ("ayes" etc.). kwami (talk) 03:25, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Kwamikagami, well, one could argue that u in double-u is more of a symbol than a morpheme of any sort, but it actually just refers to the letter name U (not to be confused with the letter itself). So the real question is why ues, aes, ees and oes are the established plurals of their corresponding letter names, which, by the way, don't have extra ees in singular. I suppose, they were established long before the modern rules, but I might be wrong. --GareginRA (talk) 20:12, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
- "double-u's" would also be irregular. kwami (talk) 10:59, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami: My understanding was that this category was present because the term double-u, i.e., the name for the letter W, refers to the fact that the letter has the shape of two U's, and indeed it originated as a ligature. That said, I'm not the one who added the category, I just changed the sortkey. (If this is removed from the category, doubleyou should also go.) 70.172.194.25 01:22, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, I don't think that's what the category is for, or else we'd need to include things like Eszett. It would be appropriate if a "W" was a shape in trellising or something. kwami (talk) 01:29, 27 January 2023 (UTC)