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

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.