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Hexadecimapus
Not word coinage - a different approach to expressing plurals | |
English generally lacks numerical coefficients, unlike some
languages spoken in East Asia and elsewhere. For
instance, in China there are a number of words which have
to be used between a cardinal number and a noun
depending on the nature of the noun concerned, so for
example there is a word
for enumerating flat objects,
another for long objects and so on. This also takes place
in Malay/Indonesian, where, if i recall correctly, there is a
word "ekor", meaning "tail" which must be used for
counting animals.
This feature of language has traces in English, in two
different ways. Firstly, there is a tendency for some
animals to have irregular plurals, and even more so
historically, such as "sheep", "cow", "ox" and "fish". In my
dialect of English, this also applies to the word "chicken".
Secondly, we count "head" of cattle rather than just cattle,
and also use phrases such as "sheets of paper", "grains of
sand" and so forth. Hence we do sort of have numerical
correlatives in English.
I find it particularly interesting that we say "head" of cattle
and do headcounts, just as Malay/Indonesian uses "tail" of
animals. Both of those use an organ of the animal
concerned which seems particularly significant to the
human counting the animal. We also do this when we
name animals scientifically.
Now, one thing which reduces me to a spasm of pedantic
indecisiveness is the plural of "octopus". I therefore insist
on calling more than one octopus "octopodes" rather than
"octopus", "octopuses", "octopi" or any other variation on
that theme. I suggest that this means of counting is a
solution to this dilemma, as follows.
Imagine two of these animals. The impression one might
get is of a writhing morass of sixteen tentacles.
Conceptually, an octopus can be envisaged as a knot of
eight tentacles joined together by a visceral hump and a
head. The real unit we are counting is the eighth of an
octopus represented by a single tentacle plus a octal
segment of the rest of its body. This is even backed up by
its neurology to some extent, since an individual octopus
tentacle has its own reflexes and continues to squirm after
being severed, like a lizard's tail.
Therefore i say, enough with the endless bickering and
uncertainty about the plural of the word "octopus".
Instead, count them by tentacles. Two of them are a
"hexadecimapus", a hundred an "octohectopus" and so on.
Also, extend this to other things. A lobster is a decapod.
Ten of them are a hectopod, a hundred a kilopod and so
forth. Even strands of spaghetti - a kilosphaghetto. And
so forth.
Squirming octopus tentacles in a bowl
http://www.youtube....=PL2FF5F5A68DD63D68
Can't believe that I, a veggie, am posting this! [nineteenthly, Nov 27 2011]
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Annotation:
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//extend this to other things// When counting
people, the rules would change according to
context. A manual labourer, for example, would be
a pair of hands, but a speaker (at a seminar, or
meeting) would be a single tongue, and a dentist
would schedule a single appointment for 32
teeth. |
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Presumably Proctologists would enumerate their clients in either Sarkozies (for little arseholes) or Berlusconis (for huge ones) ... |
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//so for example there is a word for enumerating flat objects, another for long objects and so on// |
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Japanese is one up on that, as it has the long/flat object counters plus a different counter for one minute or more than one minute ie ippun (one minute) nifun (two minutes) . |
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Getting back onto the topic (what break the habit of a lifetime, I hear you say) we do already have something similar in English already, a pair of trousers etc |
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Under this system would keeping crows as pets make one a murderer? |
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So, if I have seven octopodes but one of them has
lost two legs, and another one which I can't quite
see may or may not have lost a leg, how many do
I have? |
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It is an ingeniously flawed system. Octopodata
are counted in octopus-sized units because, for
example, they are caught and eaten (usually) as
entire animals. In describing how this terminology
might be useful, you started by saying "imagine
two of these animals", which is exactly the way
people do think of octopodia. |
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As for the lobster, I know two lobsters when I see
them, but it would require some modest mental
gymnastics to identify the two lobsters as a
twentyopod. |
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Also, under your system I would be unsure
whether I was buying one good lobster, or two
lobsters which had both been involved in severe,
limb-losing accidents. |
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As for Malay, Japanese and other such
affectations, there is no need to go aping them.
For instance, Malay, for example, has a perverse
and verbose
way of representing many plurals: I
would have to say that this idea is bollock-
bollock. |
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//Octopodata are counted in octopus-sized units
because, for example, they are caught and eaten
(usually) as entire animals.// They are indeed so
counted, and they are indeed, caught and eaten
in that manner. The flaw in your argument is the
unsupported "because." Perhaps they are counted
in octopus-sized units for some other reason.
Perhaps it's because that is how the language
treats them; change the language, and see what
happens to the accounting system. |
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(And let's have no nonsense about Sapir-Whorf.
The current fashion for trashing it is a reaction
against its unquestioned acceptance in overstated
form.) |
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//ingeniously flawed// yeah. [+] You should really
be voting for this [MB]. Maybe if the title were
"Change English to make it harder for foreigners to
learn?" |
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// "Change English to make it harder for foreigners to learn?" // |
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That's Baked (Pronounced "Ghoti"). |
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//You should really be voting for this [MB]// Well,
I haven't voted against. |
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The problem is, an octopus has eight tentacles,
but it also has several hundred suckers, two eyes,
a few trillion cells, and a few hundred trillion
mitochondria. One might equally, therefore, refer
to one octopus as a bignumbermitochondriocyte,
or as a biopticon. |
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I think we need to ask an octopus whether it sees
itself as an octopus or as a collection of various
types of component. |
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There is also the problem that four people, two
wallabies or one octopus would all be called the
same thing. One person carrying a wallaby would
also be confused with an insect, which could in
turn be confused with a partially-eaten octopus.
I'm not saying that such ambiguity is necessarily a
bad thing - it would not be a problem, for
example, for a very versatile shoemaker - but it
does need addressing. |
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To remedy the problem, an octopus would have to
be referred to as "an octopus of octopus
tentacles", to distinguish it from a pair of
wallabies ("an octopus of wallaby legs"). This,
however, introduces the risk of recursiveness, and
some sort of ad hoc renormalization scheme
would have to be devised again. |
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There is a tendency for people to be counted as
working central nervous systems, so a brain dead
human is not a person, an embryo at the
blastocyst stage is not a person, and so on. Same
applies to other vertebrates. One reason this
might make sense (although as a previous
notorious discussion between us revealed, i think
it's flawed) is that vertebrate nervous systems are
quite centralised. Arthropod and mollusc nervous
systems are somewhat different. Cephalopod
tentacles tend to work more by reflex than
vertebrate limbs (though clearly vertebrate limbs
are also partly reflexive). Therefore it makes more
sense than it would with vertebrates to count
arthropod limbs and cephalopod tentacles as
individuals rather than each body as one. This has
a precedent in zooids. A strong case could be
made to count individual zooids of a bryozoan or
hydroid colony as individuals rather than the
whole agglomeration. |
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So i'm saying organised unit = individual. And all
you need do is count in Greek and Latin. |
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//ask an octopus whether it sees itself as an
octopus or as a collection// |
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Consider the (superficially) easier case of asking a
human, rather than an octopus, whether it sees
itself as one or several. Sperry's callosotomy (split
brain) experiments suggest that the non-
(language-)dominant
hemisphere is capable
of answering "two" while the spoken answer is
"one." Lynn Margoulis (in pace requiescant) would
presumably have argued for further erosion of
these identity-boundaries. To say nothing of the
pandemonium model of cognition. Hence my
proposal for
context-dependent rules for counting people.
But I'll amend that to context-dependent rules for
counting everything. |
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I recently heard the Radio City Rockettes refered
to as "72 legs" (for performances in New York,
there are 36, by the ordinary way of counting). |
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//So i'm saying organised unit = individual.// |
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But, by that reasoning, there is far more reason to
describe an octopus as a collection of cells than as
a collection of tentacles. |
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The integration within a cell is very intimate -
break up a cell and you basically have dead goo. |
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In contrast, the additional levels of
interdependency needed to build cells into an
organ or a tentacle are relatively trivial, which is
why pregnancy and cancer can happen and why
you can culture cells in vitro. |
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The yet further levels of interdependency that
coordinate the tentacles into an octopus are
simpler still. |
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Therefore, if you are going to break an animal
down into meaningfull subunits, then it makes no
sense to describe an octopus as eight tentacles,
but some sense to describe it as a collection of
cells. The same is true of bryozoans and other
simple organisms - individual cells are viable
(sometimes with a bit of coddling), so you can
consider them as individuals; or you can consider
the whole colony/organism as an individual; but it
makes no sense to stop half-way between those
extremes. |
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Also, what about elephants? Is an elephant a
monoprobiscid, a monocauda, a tetrapode, a bi-
lung or a poly-bone? (Speaking of poly-bones...) |
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//Is an elephant a monoprobiscid, a monocauda, a
tetrapode, a bi- lung or a poly-bone// Yes.
Depending on context. |
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Definitely with you on that one, [mouseposture]. |
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[MB], yes, you have a point. However, i think it
depends on context there too. You might want to
think of living things as collections of cells.
However, i think it might also depend on a naive
apprehension of the organisms concerned.
Looking at a collection of polyps, you might see it
as a single coral or a colony of polyps. Come to
think of it, what interests me about what i've just
said is that the word "polyp" is from "polypus", so
in fact corals are already plural in an indefinite
way, so that's fine. |
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You raise an interesting question though: why do
we choose the units we do? Sand is a mass noun
and we don't talk about "sands" but "grains of
sand", but for some reason we talk about both hair
and hairs. I have no idea why. Maybe if our heads
were covered in grains of sand we would think
differently. |
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What about books? You can have a book, which is published as a set of three volumes, each of which is of course a book. And the book might be divided into five books which are distributed across the three volumes. |
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Funnily enough, i tend to think of a multiple volume
book as four-dimensional and so i suppose a volume
divided into several books could make the jump to
hyperspace before it becomes polytomic. A multi-
volume work containing several books each would be
five-dimensional. Therefore, such a work would be a
hypervolume i suppose. |
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//it depends on context there too.// |
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That was exactly my point. The only self-consistent
rules are: |
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A) Decide what you want to count
B) Count those things to get a number, N
C) State that you have counted N such things. |
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This seems like a simple and workable system, does it
not? |
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So, if I'm looking at two octopi and I am interested in
octopi as animals, then: |
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A) =Whole octopi
B) =2
C) = "I have counted 2 octopi" |
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Or, if I am looking at the same two octopi but am
interested in tentacles, then: |
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A) = Tentacles
B) = 16
C) = "I have counted 16 tentacles". |
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This system, which is so subtle and complex that only
children seem to grasp it intuitively, is equally
applicable to the suckers, cells, eyes or mitochondria
of any number of octopi. It is, I believe, pretty much
foolproof, though not necessarily halfbakerproof. |
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Now, if you want to raise the issue of "hairs/hair" or
"waters/water" or "sands/grains of sand/sand", then this
is pretty much a different topic, though not so
different from the first one. |
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The rule for such cases is: |
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A) If the substance is continuous as perceived and you
are referring to one body of the substance, or to the
substance in general, then it is called "{substance}"
(water; or hair/sand viewed from a distance). |
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B) If the substance is continuous as perceived, but you
are referring to two or more independent bodies of the
substance, then they are called "{substance}s" (the
waters of the great lakes; the hairs of various
marsupials; the sands of different deserts). |
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C) If the substance is discontinuous as perceived (sand
or hair close up), then it is referred to either as: |
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C1) "an item of {substance}" (if it is seldom considered
as discontinuous, and hence the discontinuity needs to
be emphasized) - a grain of sand; a molecule of
water
or
C2) "a {substance}" (if it is often considered as
discontinuous, and hence the discontinuity need not
be emphasized) - a hair. |
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There. I think that covers everything. |
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This could have prevented some of Bilbo's guests at his farewell party feeling insulted when he said it was a gross of hobbits that he had invited. Particularly the Sackville-Bagginses thought they had just been invited to complete the number. I would like to know what words you would recommend in this particular case. |
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Sorry, [MB], the use of any suffix-based plural for
octopus makes me go twitchy. However, on the
second bit, octopus, AKA a collection of eight
items each called a monopus, is made of "pus", not
in the sense of dead leukocytes but in a novel
sense akin to the senses of the words "bacon" and
"beef". A collection of pus in this sense equals a
tentacle plus an eighth of the rest of the
organism. This is not entirely silly because
although molluscs are generally unsegmented,
arthropoda are, so in that sense the word "pod"
simply means "half a segment of an arthropod body
carrying a leg plus that leg". That's a clear unit
which can on the whole be observed by the naked
eye. In a way, that's less neat than the octopus
example because it's only half a segment and not a
slice of pus. So now i come to think of it,
unsegmented animals should maybe have different
plurals than segmented ones. |
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Sometime I come across a thread that would probably work unedited as a radio programme (akin to an episode of QI but without that programme's tendency towards (a) nob-gags and (b) brazen smuggery). This is one such thread. Well played, gentlemen. |
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Perhaps the pragmatic solution is simply to refer to
octopus as "a portion". |
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I have to concur with calum. I think QI would work much better if it were chaired by Melvyn Bragg rather than Stephen Fry.
//it also has several hundred suckers//
They wouldn't be interested in buying some payment protection insurance at all, would they?
Also, 'head of cattle' and other such phrases are not phrases that are used in everyday language, they are a form of professional argot. Most people, when they see a field with some cows in it (if they are not too busy texting to pay it any attention at all) would think, "oh look, there are some cows in that field!". Nobody would say "oh look, there are some head of cattle in that field" unless they wanted to be beaten up. |
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I would also column with canker - escept, I suppose, that I wouldn't mind the game-show adaptation of this thread being hosted by Victoria Coren. |
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This is of course a potential script. Who would
you
like to play you in the small screen adaptation of
this idea,
[MB]? |
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[DrBob], that's true in the case of "head of cattle"
but not so much in some other cases, for instance
we do say "grains of sand", "sticks of celery" and
"sheets of paper", and in some other languages it
would be ungrammatical not to count things in
that manner. |
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//Who would you like to play you in the small screen
adaptation of this idea, [MB]?// |
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That's a tricky one. We need to find someone who is
a cross between Stephen Fry and Johnny Dep, with
overtones of Dylan Moran. |
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As MB said, "grains of sand" is used to clarify from sand in the collective sense, ditto all other examples. |
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Collective nouns are well known, and are frequently used in this same manner "murder of crows" to differentiate from a discrete number of crows. This is simply the reverse of that usage. |
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Also, shouldn't it be hexadecAmpus, hexadeci implies dividing by 16? |
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//Johnny Dep//
sp: Johnny Vegas. |
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Strangely enough, I was once offered the
opportunity to play Johnny Vegas on the silver
screen. |
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Why do we wear a pair of pants but only one bra? |
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//a cross between Stephen Fry and Johnny Dep,// |
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Max Dep Fry - sounds unhealthy |
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[MechE], only if you interpret the prefix in that
context as if it's a SI prefix, which wasn't quite
what i meant. I was actually thinking of extending
it by alternating between hexadecimApus - a
collection of female octopus tentacles;
hexadecimOpus - a collection of male octopus
tentacles, and hexadecimIpus - a collection of
octopus tentacles of mixed gender. |
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Which makes me wonder: how is cephalopod sex
determined developmentally? |
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A few years ago I saw a TV program about a very closely integrated pair of Saiamese twins - essentially they had one complete body with two heads.
Besides being a completely brilliant thing for actually existing as a functional entity[1], they faced the same issue of countability. For example, they elected to get a driving licence each to be on the safe side. I had to wonder if they had a job whether they'd be able to claim two salaries, and so on. |
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[1] This vindicated a SF book I once read, which had a two-headed character.[2]
[2] No, not HHGttG. |
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Brothers of the Head maybe?
I think i saw that. There was a more recent case,
don't know if you've heard of it, where a pair of
twins are linked by a thin line of tissue between
their thalami, which enables them to use each
others' senses. |
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If one delves into the wealth of background material
generated by Tolkien, it becomes fairly obvious that any
group of hobbits numbering more than twenty or so is
known as a
'pub' of hobbits, but if you extrapolate from the original
text of Fellowship, it's reasonable to surmise that Bilbo
invited 144 guests to his party simply because a gross of
hobbits is actually known as a 'party'. |
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Actually, it's because Bilbo and Frodo shared the same
birthdate and 144 was their combined age at the time (111
and 33), but I believe my point stands just the same. |
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It does indeed, good one. |
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What will you call a centipede times 10? |
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A kilopede? Or, you consider pede to be two
different things, one of which is a pair of legs on a
single body segment and the other of which is a
radial segment in geometric terms of an anatomic
segment which happens to have the same name. |
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