Re: AW: Nomenclature

[Neal H Walfield <neal@cs.uml.edu>]

> New Idea: I personally like it like  "the Borg", though this implicates
> plural use as "the hurd are a set of servers emulating whatever". Ok, I
> like Star Treck ... ;-)

Your English is wrong:

If hurd is singular, one says:

the hurd is a set of servers
    ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^
     agreement     prepositional phrase

``a set'' is singular: it is a collective noun.  Here, the noun (hurd),
the verb (is) and the predicate noun (a set) all agree.

Does ``The car are a set of servers'' make sense?  No.

If plural, one says:

the hurd are servers
    ^^^^ ^^^
    agreement

Again, the three agree.

Does ``The cars are servers'' make sense?  Yes.

``hurd'' is correctly used as a singular noun.

Proof:

hurd => hird of unix replacing daemons
     => hird (we ignore the prepositional phrase)
     => hurd of interfaces representing depth
     => hurd (again ignore the prepositional phrase)
     => hurd 

Thus, hurd reduces to itself.  It is used in a collective sense
(i.e. interfaces representing depth).  Thus, it must be a collective
noun and therefore singular.

Q.E.D.

-Neal

-- 
Neal H Walfield
University of Massachusetts at Lowell
neal@walfield.org or neal@cs.uml.edu