On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 7:18 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > I'm not an expert on Indian English, but I understand that in that > dialect it is grammatically correct to say "the codes", just as in UK and > US English it is grammatically correct to say "the programs".
I wouldn't necessarily even consider it an Indian thing, as I've known Americans to use the same phrase. On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > On 23 Nov 2013 02:18:03 GMT, Steven D'Aprano > <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> declaimed the following: > >> >>Aside: I love the fact that pea, as in green peas or black-eyed peas, is >>a back-formation from an uncountable noun. Originally English had the >>word "pease", as in "pease porridge hot" from the nursery rhyme. Like >>wheat, rice, barley and others, You would have to say something like >>"give me a grain of pease" if you only wanted one. Eventually, people >>began to assume that "pease", or "peas", was the plural and therefore >>"pea" must be the singular. I look forward to the day that "rice" is the >>plural of "ri" :-) > > Rice is the plural of rouse Not according to the dictionary. But it does seem a more likely candidate for a hypothetical back formation than "ri", which perhaps was your point. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
