IndigoGollum comments on Time to change the English language

Time to change the English language (media.piefed.social)

submitted 7 months ago by PugJesus@piefed.social to c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works

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[–] IndigoGollum@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago (4 children)

"dwarves" and "elves" are consistent with things like "wolves" instead of "wolfs", "lives" instead of "lifes".

Fun fact: this never got applied to dwarf stars, which are still "dwarfs".

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[–] kindnesskills@literature.cafe 10 points 7 months ago (1 child)

"Dwarfs" is just short for "Dwarf S(tars)". The plural is on star, not dwarf, and hidden in the shortened version.

(Source: my ass, pleasedon'tquotemeonthis)

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[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 5 points 7 months ago

Nah, I think for titles,. it's an exception.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, for example, are not the Maple Leaves.

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

Except the etymology of elf/elfs would disagree, and Tolkien was just wrong.

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[–] Skua@kbin.earth 2 points 7 months ago

To be fair to him, he acknowledges that dwarfs would be the accepted version and justifies it by saying that if we talked about dwarfs or dwarves more often in regular English, we might have had a nonstandard plural for them as we do with many other common subjects. Elves also pre-dates him significantly, though I don't doubt that he was a significant factor in it becoming the standard version. It seems there are even some examples of singular elve

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