616: Old Conventions Aug 15, 2016

There are a lot of ideas that people have about language which are not consistent with the way that people talk, or even write. 'Plural' would often be defined as "more than one"; 0 is less than 1, but it takes the plural, such as in "I have zero dogs". Many ideas like that, or also that sentences have a subject and a verb—when most things people to the Greeks or Romans. Not including the ways that prescriptivism is often to make English appear more as Latin, people think about languages in ways laid out by such people as Aristotle, but those old ideas about Greek are still stuck in the minds of English speaking people. Aristotle also thought that objects roll on the ground because of demons, but that's a different matter.