Can "email" be plural?
7%palmtree
I feel that since the email is electronic in nature, like water
and air, email is not a countable noun, email cannot be used in
its plural form like emails.
Am I correct?
Thanks,
palmtree
Polar
Everybody says emails. I doubt if certain technological terms can be
made to obey strict grammar rules.
Your analysis is quite poetic, however!
--
Polar
Clark S. Cox III
> Can I say "emails" or do I have to say "email messages"?
>
> I feel that since the email is electronic in nature, like water
> and air, email is not a countable noun, email cannot be used in
> its plural form like emails.
Email *is* a countable noun. Compare "I sent an email earlier today"
with "I drank a water earlier today". While I doubt I've ever said
"emails", it doesn't really sound wrong to me.
--
Clark S. Cox III
clar...@yahoo.com
http://www.whereismyhead.com/clark/
Benjamin Lukoff
>
> Can I say "emails" or do I have to say "email messages"?
>
> I feel that since the email is electronic in nature, like water
> and air, email is not a countable noun, email cannot be used in
> its plural form like emails.
Water and air are not electronic in nature :)
> Am I correct?
Well, do you say "an email" or "an email message"? If you say "an
email" then you should be able to say "emails". If you can only say "an
email message" or "email" then "emails" is out.
meirm...@erols.com
Lukoff <l=u=k=o_b_e_@y+a+h-o-o-.-c=o=m> posted:
>"7%palmtree" wrote:
>>
>> Can I say "emails" or do I have to say "email messages"?
>>
>> I feel that since the email is electronic in nature, like water
>> and air, email is not a countable noun, email cannot be used in
>> its plural form like emails.
>
>Water and air are not electronic in nature :)
How did I miss that?
I'm going to have to retake that course on propaganda resistence.
>
>> Am I correct?
>
>Well, do you say "an email" or "an email message"? If you say "an
>email" then you should be able to say "emails". If you can only say "an
>email message" or "email" then "emails" is out.
Born west of Pittsburgh Pa. 10 years
Indianapolis, 7 years
Chicago, 6 years
Brooklyn NY 12 years
Baltimore 17 years
Mary MacTavish
<l=u=k=o_b_e_@y+a+h-o-o-.-c=o=m> said:
>Well, do you say "an email" or "an email message"? If you say "an
>email" then you should be able to say "emails". If you can only say "an
>email message" or "email" then "emails" is out.
When I get my daily bills and advertisements from the mailbox, I "get
the mail." I don't "get the mails," even when there's more than one
envelope.
`
Mary MacTavish
http://www.prado.com/~iris
"I like you guys who want smaller government - you
know, just small enough to fit in our bedrooms."
Josh to Congressman Skinner, The West Wing
Eric Walker
[...]
>When I get my daily bills and advertisements from the mailbox,
>I "get the mail." I don't "get the mails," even when there's
>more than one envelope.
I suspect that the "mail" part of "email" is misleading, in that
the term "email" seems to be analogous to "letter" rather than
to plain "mail."
It looks--to me anyway--as if email has taken the form of words
like "fish": it can be used in the singular form as a collective
(all the fish in the sea, my email sometimes overwhelms me) but
also in the plural when referring to a more or less definite
quantity (three fishes were swimming together, I received five
e-mails in just the past hour).
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, Owlcroft House
Neeraj 'The Ridge' Nagarkatti
I email, you email, he/she/it emails
7%palmtree" wrote:
--
Like I said to the
magician, "How's tricks"?
Dan Seriff
>
> Can u have email as a verb, as in:
>
> I email, you email, he/she/it emails
Yep. Past tense "emailed".
Incidentally, I've been told by several Germans that they've borrowed
English "to email" straight into German as "emailen", which conjugates normally.
Ich emaile
Du emailst
etc...
This also reminds me of a language simulation program that I've heard
about. It is programmed to be able to figure out the past tense form of
various English verbs, given only a basic dataset with which to work. It
was generally pretty good, but occasionally came out with some amusingly
bizzare results. The one it produced that I'm reminded of is "mail" ->
past tense "membled". I'd love to see this catch on.
"Hey Bob, did you get the mail?"
"Yeah, and I membled that package you gave me."
:-)
--
Daniel Seriff
micro...@sericap.com
http://members.tripod.com/microtonal
Honesty means never having to say "Please don't flush me down the toilet!"
- Bob the Dinosaur
Half of America believes homosexuality is wrong...the same percentage
believes that Socrates was a great Indian chief.
7%palmtree
"Eric Walker" <ewa...@owlcroft.com> wrote in message
news:rjnyxrebjypebsgpb...@news.cis.dfn.de...
I did not intended to compare email and water or email and air
in their scientific breakdowns, but am concerned with their
grammatical usage. As you analyzed that email belongs to
collective nouns (An uncountable noun, what it is called in my
ESL textbook used in high school).
Regarding how we account email, I would argue that it be said,
two pieces of email, or two email messages.
Just my 2 cents,
palmtree
Daniel James
wrote:
> It looks--to me anyway--as if email has taken the form of words
Yes, /exactly/ the comparison I was going to make.
(and, like fish, it comes from a net.)
Cheers,
Daniel.
JB
> Regarding how we account email, I would argue that it be said,
> two pieces of email, or two email messages.
In theory you are correct. Letters arrive by mail. Email (the
electronic mail system) delivers messages. We 'check our email for
messages'. But 'messages' by itself does not implicitly connote email,
the way 'letters' connotes mail. For some reason 'e-letters' or
'e-messages', while logical, never became popular. They were called
'email messages', which over time became shortened in common usage to
'emails'.
'Emails' is informal. I don't think a formal business letter or
contract would refer to earlier email correspondence as 'emails'.
--JB
7%palmtree
or
> contract would refer to earlier email correspondence as
'emails'.
I once saw an online documentary video describing how heavily
Miscrofot rrelies on email for making important busines
decisions...
palmtree
Benjamin Lukoff
Like small fish, it goes through the net. It doesn't come from the net!