Re: Change templates: CD -> installation medium - final patch

[Justin B Rye <justin.byam.rye@gmail.com>]

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Justin B Rye wrote:
>> There are several related nouns here, which behave differently:
>>   * "(broadcast) medium/media" (and "meejuh", treated as singular);
>>   * "item of (removable storage) media/some media";
>>   * "(spirit) medium/mediums".
>> Frankly it's a mess, but it won't get better if you mix them up.
> 
> Not really.

Yes, really: it won't.  Mind you, I can't promise you it'll get better
whatever we do.

> The origin of the word is Latin. The word is grammatically
> neutrum, for which the singular is "-um", the plural is "-a". It's
> not a mess at all.

Etymology does not determine current grammatical behaviour.  All words
come from somewhere, and if we could trace their origins back far
enough, most of them (apart from recent inventions like "thumbdrive")
would turn out to have once meant something different, or had
different inflectional morphology, or both.  Think of "agenda",
"stamina", or "opera" (all plural in Latin, but uncontroversially
singular in English).  Germanic languages also have a habit of
borrowing Italian names for foodstuffs as grammatically singular:
"spaghetti", "ravioli", "panini", "zucchini".  They're plural in
Italian, but "seven spaghetti" is just bad English.

> It's "the media", because that's a plural word, like "the news".

That's not the sense of "media" that's relevant.

>>> Using "media" for a singular word just sounds weird for anyone knowing
>>> Latin. And FWIW it's also "Medium" in German when talking about one disk.
>> 
>> Unfortunately it turns out that Deutschlish sounds weird to anyone
>> who knows English.
> 
> Both languages have imported the word from Latin. I cited renowned dictionaries,
> you are basically citing your own and are being condescending because
> you are a native speaker and I'm not.

Well, as it happens I also have a Masters degree in linguistics, so I
probably use unhelpful technical terms without noticing, but more
importantly I know the limitations of dictionaries.  The first step is
to get straight what it is that you're trying to look up.  Looking up
"medium" in the category sense is no more useful than looking up the
word that means "spiritualist".  And unfortunately, itemisable chunks
of data-storage media are a new thing that people have only started
talking about in the past few decades (even now, people rarely need to
talk in terms of the generic cover-term "media"), and it's a new idea
that doesn't add a new headword for the dictionaries to define - it's
a new usage of the *plural* word "media", so it tends to fall between
the cracks.

> Please cite a dictionary where "media" is used as a singular word
> not being in the context of "news".

Again, your problem is that that isn't the right question.  The only
sense of "media" that's commonly treated as singular is the
*colloquial* usage of "the news media", and that's the wrong one.  The
sense that's relevant here is "storage media", which *has* no simple
singular form better than "item of media".

It isn't even a proper mass noun - words like "spaghetti" are
singulars without (itemising) plurals, while "media" is a plural with
no itemising singular.  The bad news is, words like this usually end
up reinterpreting their plural form as a singular (cf. "data"), so as
far as conformance with Latin grammatical rules is concerned things
are only likely to get worse.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package