User talk:Avicennasis

Hello, Avicennasis, and welcome to the Simple English Wiktionary!

We hope you will be happy editing here. Some helpful pages to begin with are Wiktionary:Community Portal, Wiktionary:Useful, Help:Contents, Wiktionary:Rules, Wiktionary:How to change a page, and Help:Creating a new entry.

If you want to talk with other members or ask a question, you can visit Wiktionary:Simple talk. Administrators can also help you with more difficult problems. You can also ask me for help. The best way to do that is to leave a message on my talk page. Just remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing "~~~~" (four tildes) at the end of your words.

Good luck and happy editing! Griffinofwales (talk) 23:52, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi there

Hi there! Welcome to the Simple English Wiktionary! I've noticed your work over the past few days, and I must say that I am very impressed with them! Please keep up the good work! Cheers, Razorflame 18:22, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Why thanks! :) I try to help out as much as I can. Granted, most of my work is somewhat automated, as I don't trust my knowledge of verbs and prepositions and whatnot, but it's good to know I'm helping in some way. Avicennasis (talk) 18:30, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Plurals

Please do not remove plural forms unless there is good reason to. You've removed a plural for from DOS, but then you've put it as countable and left an example with a plural in it. Then you removed the plural from cardboard. Here's an example from the Atlantic Monthly, Tacked to the front of the airy, bright, tearoom-like restaurant were three shirt cardboards inscribed with "We're glad you're here!" You've made other such changes. Please, don't.--Brett (talk) 01:41, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

I do not know what you mean by "put it as countable". If you look at the page before I edited it, it gave two plurals, DOS's and DOSses, both of which were deleted by an admin for the same reason stated in my edit summary. EnWt does not have entries for these either, and being in the IT field myself, I have never heard the plural terms. I should have removed the example using it, however I did not see it at the time. cardboards is the same; no entry on EnWt, no plural form listed on their cardboard article, and as far as I could find with Google, the only use I saw of cardboards is in relation to the band, w:The Cardboards. I am sorry for any mistakes I may have made, and feel free to correct me, however please note I did take time to investigate each case before I made any actions. Avicennasis (talk) 02:42, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm glad to see that you took the time to investigate. When I say you put it as countable, I mean that the page, after you edited it, says "countable and uncountable". A countable noun is one like cat (e.g., one cat, two cats, etc.) rather than one like crockery (not one crockery, two crockeries). Almost all countable nouns (and indeed many uncountable nouns) have plurals. For DOS, consider the fact that Microsoft published more than one DOS, and other companies were also publishing them. So altogether, there were many ____ (fill in the blank). As for cardboard, a simple google search turns up lots of examples of cardboards in the top 20 hits alone. A better place to look is in the BNC and COCA. I hope this is helpful and that I don't come across as too grumpy.--Brett (talk) 02:56, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

No prob. Having a plural for an acronym just... sounds wrong to my ears. For me, in speech, I would use the full phrase, e.g., "I bought three Disk Operating Systems today" vs. "I bought 3 DOS's today". I will admit again, however, my knowledge on the English parts of speech are very lacking, so I will defer to your expertise. As for the countable issue, if you are referring to (countable & uncountable), that existed on the page before my edit. So, I didn't put it as countable, rather, I left it as countable. :) Also, I used Google's define command, which list results for the definition with citations as to where the info is from, rather than common search results. I learned a long time ago that even with 77 million search results, alot is still not a word. :) I was not aware, however, of BNC and COCA, and I will make heavy use of these before anymore such changes. I appreciate the help and the response. Avicennasis (talk) 03:47, 12 July 2010 (UTC)