At 3:38:49 PM on Monday, August 8, 2005, Richard Wordingham
wrote:
> Examples of morphological rules in English include the
> doublets _bodice_/_bodies_ and _dice_/_dies_. The case of
> _pence_/pennies_ is a bit more complicated. The meanings
> with /s/ are collective, if not singular. In normal
> English, the six-sided object with dots on it is a 'dice',
> not a 'die'!
True in British English, but not (yet) in U.S. English.
> 'Sixpence' is (was?) an amount, not six coins.
> (Post-decimalisation words like 'twelfpence' and
> 'twelfpenny' chiefly elicited puzzled looks.)
Larry Trask posted on this to sci.lang a few months before
he died:
I wasn't aware there was anything official about it, but
it's true that the British unit of currency is now the
pence, invariable singular and plural, as in "one pence"
and "five pence", and 'penny' is now obsolete as the name
of a sum of money. I tried to keep it going for a while,
but my attempts produced only bewilderment, so I gave up.
This is not a novel phenomenon. The same thing has
already happened in Britain to the venerable pair
'die'/'dice', which has been universally re-formed as
'dice'/'dice'. The same development is now underway in my
beloved homeland, but things haven't gone as far over
there. My hobby is board games, and it is noteworthy that
the rules to a British game *invariably* say "Throw a
dice", while the rules to an American game equally
invariably say "Throw a die".
Things have gone so far in Britain that most people here
no longer understand the origin of the phrase "The die is
cast". When I ask people about it, they believe it has
something to do with the casting of metal dies. Honest.
I was once playing Scrabble with a well-educated British
friend, and she played DI. I challenged her and asked her
what it was supposed to be, and she replied "Well, you
keep talking about throwing a di when you're playing
games." Also honest. (But I lost my challenge: DI is
valid in British scrabble for unrelated reasons.)
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Brian