Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 6, 2022 16:20 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin by Wol
Parent article: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

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.

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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.