On Jun 19, 2023, at 9:35 PM, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <tagging@openstreetmap.org> wrote: > Jun 20, 2023, 01:36 by g...@lexort.com: > In English, the adjective for the shop tends to be singular, when that > adjective is a noun. The plural just sounds funny. For example we have > "car dealer", "grocery store", "grocery store", "cell phone store", etc. > So I am fine with shop=guns being viewed as a typo for shop=gun. > Can anyone else confirm this? I though that shop=guns would be preferable > > But after that comment and looking at > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:shop > I am not really sure.
As a native speaker of US English, I concur that tagging for shop=* "tends to be singular," and that this doesn't sound odd to my ear when I hear or read it. I also note that some are plural, as well (such as shop=beverages, shop=spices). However, if I were to imagine many of the extant tags for shop=* which are singular, specific examples here include shop=cheese, shop=chocolate, shop=coffee, shop=confectionery, shop=frozen_food, shop=pastry, shop=tea, any of these COULD be plural (requiring some usual English-specific spelling oddities, like pastry becoming pastries) without sounding terribly wrong. In other words, the singular versions here sound more natural, but the plural forms aren't absolutely incorrect. Conversely, if shop=beverages or shop=spices were to become singular, those forms wouldn't sound terribly incorrect either. Honestly (as a multilingual linguist in both natural and artificial / programming languages), I believe such "singularity / plurality" is very example-specific, and perhaps dialect-specific. There is a similar, perhaps related concept called a "mass noun" (like "sand" or "sugar") which you can't really say whether is singular or plural, it is in a class by itself: "make sure you get all that sugar in the sack." Is/are "sugar" singular or plural? Well, yes, um, no...it is a mass noun and is "uncountable," which have no concept of singular or plural. (These are distinct from "count nouns," which DO have a concept of singular or plural). I think each example for shop=* is distinct. You might get some discussion (in a particular dialect of English, for example), whether a shop that sells "pickles" (pickled cucumbers and other pickled vegetables or foods) is correctly shop=pickle or shop=pickles (or even shop=pickled, but I digress). These are very specific and to a "local ear" one or the other might sound more correct: it's highly locally-dependent. In the case of shop=gun, I could go either way (like beverage/s or spice/s): shop=gun seems OK, as I hear "gun shop," and also shop=guns seems OK, as "a shop that sells guns" works for my ear as well. My apologies, non-native English speakers: this really is just English being weirdly English. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
