I bet you didnt know that

Ok smart alecs, it's just the logic of how English works - which admittedly is often pretty fuzzy. NB DO NOT continue reading if language geekdom is not your thing ...

The term "knock on" is what's known as an open compound. A couple of other examples could be "post office", or "court martial", but there are plenty more. If you need to use the plural form of an open compound and are unsure where to put your letter s, a good rule of thumb is to look for the noun - or where there are two nouns, to look for whichever one is key to the meaning.

There are two nouns in the phrase "post office", so which of them is the key one? Well, the phrase describes a type of office - it could be expressed as "the office of the post", but not as "the post of the office". So the key noun here is office, which means that for the plural we don't say posts office, but post offices.

On the other hand - if two soldiers appear on two different occasions before a court martial, this can be expressed by saying "Two soldiers appeared before the courts martial." Why not "court martials?" Because in this open compound, the noun is court; martial in this instance is an adjective, which is describing a type of court. Therefore, one court martial, but two courts martial.

As an aside, there are also closed compounds in English, where two words have been joined together. One example of a closed compound is the word passerby. The plural is not "passerbys", but "passersby".

However! As I said at the top, the logic of English is often pretty fuzzy. The term "court martials" has been used so often that it has by now appeared in dictionaries as an acceptable alternative form, even though technically it breaks the rules of the language. Another example of this happening is the word "literally" - until recently, (and I'll paraphrase here) this was defined as something which was genuinely, really, factually true and truly factual. However, more recent proliferation of incorrect usage such as "I literally died of embarrassment" - clearly not a genuine, real, factually true or truly factual statement - has resulted in the expansion of the dictionary definition of the word literally to include its use as an emphatic. This is because part of a dictionary's raison d'etre is to reflect current usage.

Ok then, back to rugby terms. In the open compound "knock on", which one is the noun? The answer is the word "knock". Whether it's a knock forward, a knock to the left, a knock to the right or up or down, the singular version is "knock" and the the plural of that noun is "knocks". So the plural of the open compound is indeed "knocks on". However, a dictionary definition may well include the term "knock ons" because - as with "literally" and "court martials" - its changing use has been reflected.

But it's still wrong. So there.

Interesting question - I wouldn't think so. Knock on doesn't :pac:, for a start - that's "un en-avant", which is a hyphenated compound (rather than an open compound). Life jacket, mobile phone, dinner table ... I suppose while all of these can obviously be translated, you're really asking does the linguistic format derive from French/Latin as opposed to German. I'd be more inclined to think it's due to the latter, seeing as compound words are so central to German. But I couldn't say for sure, so the honest answer is I don't know.

Interestingly, it was Irish monks who introduced the concept of spacing between words - the convention used to be that all the words of a sentence would be written together in one block, but since the holy scripts were written in Latin - a language foreign to them - they started spacing out the words to make things easier. That dates back to a good 1500 years ago, so it predates the "French" the Normans spoke - which wouldn't have been very similar to French as we know it today, more a derivation of a hybridised Latin and dialects local to northern France - not forgetting the Viking influence. Plus wasn't there a stronger influence of French on modern English tracing back to the period of the Restoration? ...

Going back to the spirit of the thread, and speaking of German ... as I said, the use of compound words is both extensive and routine in that language. For example, one of the main political parties there is abbreviated by "SDP". In English, the full version of this would translate as the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but in German the first two words are compounded, so it becomes "Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands".

Compound words in German are often derived from bureaucracy and there have been a number of contenders for the longest one, as from time to time some are officially no longer used. One example of this was the term (deep breath!)

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz*

- which translates as "law for the delegation of monitoring of beef labelling". This was no longer needed after the testing of cattle for BSE was no longer required.
* I freely admit I couldn't remember exactly what that one was, so I had to check!

I'm struggling to remember the longest one I ever encountered when living there, but I think it was along the lines of "the cap-badge of a Danube steamship company captain", which was something like (another deep breath!)

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenanstecknadel

Hmm - I've just remembered that numbers are also compounded in German. So it occurs to me that the longest word in German may not be possible to define, since it would be infinite as numbers are - unless I've missed a rule for breaking up the way to write really big numbers!

GHOST MGG wrote: »

France was still executing people by guillotine when the first star wars movie was released......

Anyone I say that to is shocked by how recent it is.

It was still there when the second Star Wars movie came out. Finally abolished in 1981.

The final victim was described as "like a child who knows it's time to go to bed but refuses to go" - a reference to him asking for a third cigarette and being denied it.

retalivity wrote: »

There were wine jars found in Pompeii marked 'Vesuvitum" - A portmanteau of Vesuvius (the nearby volcano) & vitum (The latin for wine). This is apocryphally recognised as the first example of a portmanteau & a marketing pun.

Ahem, vitum is the genetive plural of vita (Latin for life), the Latin word for wine is vinum.

Vesuvitum hence is a lovely portmanteau* of "Vesuvius, life and wine", kind of "drink wine of the Vesuvio slopes and enjoy life", or such like. Or in modern Irish talk: "get drunk and talk shíte".
The Romans, their legacy is endless ...

*Portmanteau comes from the French for clothes hanger, a suitable word were you can hang all your clothes (or words) higgledy-piggledy. But it's also a linguistic term called portmanteau allomorph, which means when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing the meaning.

Apocryphal means fictitious. So how can it be recognised as the first example of whatever?

Sincerely, little-miss-knows-it-all

or maybe not.

Carry wrote: »

Apocryphal means fictitious. So how can it be recognised as the first example of whatever?

Apocryphal to me means that has been said with conviction, but also doubt as it cannot be ultimately proved.

There may well have been some lad that came up with "tig-rice" in mesopatamia ahead of that, but alas we are not to know...Id love that to be true though!

Grayson wrote: »

Recognise the guy who's trying to raise money for Irish Independence.

When De Valera was in New York as part of that fund raising campaign he availed of the services of a law firm founded by Thomas Addis Emmet, Robert's older brother. One of the associates at the firm at the time was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

One of Thomas Addis Emmet's direct descendants was killed in the Paris Bataclan terrorist attack in 2015

Liechtenstein & Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic/Slovakia did not have diplomatic relations until 2009.

After WW2, Czechoslovakia looked to reclaim any German possessions within their borders, occupied land, stolen art etc. Liechtenstein was/is the last remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, the predecessor to the German empire, and the Liechtenstein royal family owned a heap of land & estates in silesia/morovia - modern day czech/slovakia - over 1,600 sq km, more than 10 times the size of their own country. They were a bit peeved to have their hereditary possessions lumped in with the expropriation that was going on with all the other nazi stuff - Liechtenstein in the war was not invaded, but looked to switzerland for guidance and help, and tried to remain neutral but ultimately acquiesced to the Nazi's. The royal family spent the next 60 years trying to get the land back, including going to the UN. They eventually gave in and relinquished their claim.

Does Eire not count?

Eh, England?

So England is not in Europe? Wow, that Brexit deal went through quicker than I thought it would.