On Friday, 12 June 2015 at 11:35:30 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Friday, 12 June 2015 at 11:13:08 UTC, Chris wrote:
"-ise". If you have a new generation of Englishmen that were
taught "-ize", they would find "-ise" strange. It's ridiculous
how people get attached to stuff like this.
I have to admit I use "-ize" over "-ise" because I think it
visually looks cooler. I always felt I did something wrong by
mixing "colour" and "-ize", but this thread has finally lifted
this guilt off my shoulders!
"They" as singular feels weird tho, but maybe it is related to
the archaic "thou" and "thee"? We had the same in norwegian ~60
years ago. "De" (they) was used as singular towards strangers
and "du" (you) was used with people you were familiar with.
Then you could claim to be "dus" (friendly) with people you
knew (referring to the fact that you use "du" when adressing
them). Kinda like german "Sie".
Do you speak Bokmål or Nynorsk?
Here's a nice piece about "Language Mavens". They are quite
common in every country, and invariably they don't have a clue
about how languages and the human mind work:
http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~sih01001/english/fall2007/TheLanguageMavens.pdf
