Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 5, 2022 20:58 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330)
In reply to: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin by hvd
Parent article: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Google Translate also has trouble with this sentence:

English to French:

le temps passe comme une flèche, mais les fruits volent comme une banane.

Translating this back to English gives

time flies like an arrow, but fruits fly like a banana.

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Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 5, 2022 21:12 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Which throws up another quirk of English - many words (fruit included) either have weird plurals or are number-indefinite. A similar example is sheep.

I'm guessing (like with die/dice, thou/you), the singular has simply fallen into disuse, although I have no clue what the singular might have been for fruit/sheep if that guess is correct.

Cheers,
Wol

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 6, 2022 16:20 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

I think nouns like fruit and sheep were originally uncountable, like water. That means you'd talk about a quantity of them rather than a number, so there wouldn't really be a singular or plural.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 17, 2022 9:59 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> I think nouns like fruit and sheep were originally uncountable, like water.

Something like that: for sheep at least they were similar in some cases at one time, but that was because of loss of a trailing vowel which *did* indicate a plural, presumably because you could usually figure out the number from contextual clues anyway. The OED says:

> The prehistoric plural *skǣpu normally lost its final vowel in Old English, so that nominative and accusative singular and plural became identical.