Hi Sonke I’m a native English speaker and must admit reading “trainings” sounds really weird to me and even if I personally wouldn’t say it, I probably wouldn’t correct anyone who did because the main objective is about being understood and I can understand what is meant. English has evolved and now comes in many varieties so it depends on our audience.
Another consideration could be that we think about what the training material rolls up into. Will it be categorised into courses, modules, levels, sessions etc If I were to describe it – I would say that we are creating training material so that we can present or deliver training on “Apache Foo.” That’s only one perspective, so I’m not sure what the answer is or if even there is a right one :-) Thanks Sharan On 2019/04/13 10:51:30, Sönke Liebau <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I have a question to those among us for whom English is a first language. > > I have been using the Grammarly plugin for Chrome these past few weeks, > which checks for grammatical errors as I type, and it kept highlighting > "trainings" when used in the plural form of the noun. > > Today I decided to investigate why and found that training is a gerund, > meaning a verb used as a noun and these do not have a plural form. > > Some feedback I found online was: > > "I would agree with the other answers here in principle (training has no > real plural form), although with this word I believe we are seeing language > change in action. I work in international development and among my > colleagues, “trainings” is extremely common. Not all who use this plural > form are native English speakers, but many are. I used to insist on > “training sessions” but feel it’s a losing battle." > > "In most senses of the word, "training" is a verb (I am training), a > participle (a verb acting as an adjective: training video), or a gerund (a > verb acting as a noun: training is a lot of work) > In these cases, there is no plural form (since gerund are abstract and have > no plural). If you force "training" into being a finite noun, something > that is countable, then you could have "one training", "two trainings", but > most English speaker will give you a weird look if you say that." > > In principle I guess all of this is right, but since we used "trainings" > quite frequently on the mailing list already I wondered if that part about > getting weird looks is still correct, or if language has indeed moved on > already. > > If this is indeed weird, do we need to agree on how this should be phrased > in anything official like the website etc. ? > > Best regards, > Sönke >
