Why are there two names for the Italian city of Torino (the second being Turin)? If English and Italian share the same alphabet, why do they not share the same spelling and pronunciation of names of cities? Surely Italians don’t have alternate spellings and pronunciations of their last names, right? What gives?
I know I should know this, I really do. But somehow all I can remember about 8th-grade English class is the pretty girl who sat in front of me and not any of the finer grammatical points that the dear Mrs. RottenOldHag was trying to teach me. I suppose the whole experience was character-building in some way, but it left me ignorant of certain life-enhancing facts, and it seems that the world conspires to teach me wrong.
For example, at the Supermarket the express lanes say “15 items or less”; should that be “fewer”? And how does one know? (And somewhat related: if I have two boxes of Cheerios-brand breakfast cereal, is that one item or two? What about two apples? Does it matter if I’m paying with coupons?) Do I have less time remaining and simultaneously fewer grains of sand in my hourglass?
I assume that there’s also some sort of parallel split between the terms “greater” and “more”, but with those I get really confused because it seems no one even tries to be consistent with those terms. (I suppose that makes sense: If I have twice as many cookies as you do, I’m not likely to waste time over abstruse grammatical quandaries; I’m more likely to just gloat and eat. Whereas if I have fewer(?) cookies, I might use grammar as a distraction tactic to try to obtain some of yours.)
Finally, what is one to conclude if high-ranking customer representatives consistently break all the rules in important documents? Should one point out their errors, silently correct the mistakes in subsequent drafts, or silently fume until one can’t stand it any more and launch a killing spree that would make Hannibal Lector look like a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize? (Do I need ‘more’ valium or ‘greater’?)
I fear you need more therapy than I can provide (Hannibal Lector for the Peace Prize, indeed!), but as long as your friends promise to confiscate your scissors before you go to the grocery store, I’ll try to reduce your grammatical anxieties.
All nouns in English are divided into two groups, “count” nouns and “mass” nouns. The first you can count (‘one potatoes, two potatoes, three potatoes, etc.), the second you can’t (*’one rice, two, rice(s), three rice(s)’). General quantifiers differ depending on whether they quantify a count noun or a mass noun: count nouns take ‘many’/'fewer’, mass nouns take ‘much’/'less’. Thus ‘he didn’t have many potatoes’ but ‘he didn’t have much rice’ (and not, Heaven forfend! *’much potatoes’ or *’many rice’). You are absolutely right that ‘items’ is a count noun and thus we have ‘fewer items’ and not, if you are expecting to “make PhD” in physics or to become the “boss of bosses” in the firm, *’less items.’ It would appear that grocery-store managers were even more distracted in the eighth grade than you, though why that should be Dr Language Person can’t say. In any case, if a noun would take ‘much’ on the up-side (so to speak), it should take ‘less’ on the down-side and, if ‘many’ on the up-side, then ‘fewer’ on the down-side.
As to the practical problem, I would try to silently correct them if possible, your job being to make the customer look good.
Incidentally, our records show that Mrs. RottenOldHag was actualy “Ms.” and twenty-seven, looked a lot like Angelina Jolie, and was dangling at least three boyfriends at the time. You really should have paid attention to more than her grammar.
February 14th, 2006 at 12:37
Historians of physics will remember that Heraclitus famously said, “panta rheei” (loosely: “all things change”). Not only does the natural world keep changing but so also does language. When Turin/Torino was founded it was a Roman military establishment called Augusta Taurinorum. “Augusta” after one of the emperor’s titles (“augustus”) and Taurinorum, “of the Taurini,” named after the local Celtic group. (There were lots of Augustas in the Roman world and they were distinguished from one another by the names of the local peoples. Trier in Germany was Augusta Treviorum and Augsburg, also in Germany, was another Augusta.) The Taurini were presumably the “bull-like ones” (tauros = ‘bull’) but any relationship to the Chicago Bulls is still controversial.
At some point, probably early on, Augusta Taurinorum was simplified to Taurinum (‘the Taurine [place]‘). By regular phonetic change that results in Italian Torino. Of course it’s not only its own inhabitants that need to talk about a place and, in the course of the Middle Ages, Taurinum/Torino became known to French speakers and, through the latter, English speakers. Naturally the French referred to it, as closely as the different phonological structure of French would allow, by the same name as the inhabitants of Torino did and the English speakers, in turn, called it the same thing, as closely as the phonological structure of English allowed, as the French did. But, just as Italian speakers were gradually, and regularly, changing Taurinum into Torino so did French speakers and English speakers change their pronunciations of Taurinum/Torino as their languages changed. Thus Torino is the regular Italian outcome of Latin Taurinum just as Turin is the regular English outcome of Taurinum. The relationship between the English and Italian versions of Rome/Roma (Latin Roma), Florence/Firenze (Latin Florentia), and Naples/Napoli (Latin Neapolis) is the same. Turning the tables, both English London and Italian Londra are the expected outcomes in the two languages of Latin Londinium.