My maize are wet!

[pne]

Amy was eating maize out of a tin the other day and said, at one point, "My maize are wet!" (referring to the water at the bottom of the tin).

I wonder whether the analysed the final /z/ as the plural morpheme ("mays"?)? I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense, since you're typically eating multiple grains of maize. And there's precedent, too: from count-noun "pease" to mass-noun plural "peas" with singular "pea".

The test would be to see whether she ever talks about eating one "may", I suppose.

Comments

[fridoline.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of the occasion when Frederick wanted to eat "one letter" when I was preparing lettuce for a salad.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Very intriguing!

I also find it interesting that you use the word "maize". In Australia, virtually the only word ever used is (sweet)corn, and maize tends to be restricted to the non-sweet varieties that are used as dried grain. Is this the standard in British English?

maize

[pne.livejournal.com]

It's what I thought was the word in British English, as opposed to American English corn. (Since I try to teach her British English as far as I can - it's not always easy since I was influenced by American English and don't always recognise a word as "typically AmE".)

I've subsequently seen material (such as this (http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/08/corn-sweetcorn-maize.html) from sepcommonlang) that indicates that I'm wrong and that your terminology is closer to what is in actual use in the UK, but we've grown used to it.

So I think right now I'll simply keep using it, even if it's not "good" BrE.

Re: maize

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Oh, by all means. I wasn't meaning to imply anything "wrong" about your terminology; I was just interested to know, as it wouldn't be the first time that AusE diverged from the Commonwealth standard. For the most part AusE does follow BrE, but there are a few odd instances where, for whatever reason, we seem to have adopted the AmE form instead (for instance, we use truck instead of lorry), and I just wondered whether this was one of those times.