Re: Change templates: CD -> installation medium - final patch
On 9/22/19 8:52 PM, Justin B Rye wrote:
>> 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.
Official dictionaries do, again, look it up:
> https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/media
the mediatreated as singular or plural The main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet) regarded collectively.
‘their demands were publicized by the media’
2
plural form of medium
Then click on "medium" and you get the definition of what we are talking about,
a storage medium and plural, storage media.
>> It's "the media", because that's a plural word, like "the news".
>
> That's not the sense of "media" that's relevant.
That's the only case where media is a plural-word.
Again, look it up: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/media
>>>> 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.
If you have a master's degree in linguistics, you should be able to provide
sources as every scientist does. If I'm trying to convince someone in
a physics argument, I also just don't say "I have a Diploma in Physics,
so you are wrong", but I'm actually providing sources.
>> 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".
Of course, it does. It's "one storage medium" and "many storage media",
"one recording medium", "many recording 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.
I don't really understand your argument. If your claim that the singular
for the word "medium" is not well defined, why is the Oxford dictionary
doing it?
If you have a refutable source that underlines your point, I'm more
than interested to read it. But so far you have provided zero sources
and your only argument is your degree.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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