10 April 2010

fruits

This is the sign above a shop in Kiulap, near the centre of BSB in Brunei.The standard English would be 'Fresh fruit and vegetables', which I think beautifully illustrates the quirky illogicality of English.

Think about it. Fruit and vegetables are rather similar: in both cases, there are many kinds, and often the individual items are round and you can select one or two or more. So why in standard English is fruit a singular noncount noun while vegetables is a plural noun? It just doesn't make any sense.

No wonder fruit is one of the words that is being reanalysed in many New Englishes around the world, and fruits is becoming increasingly acceptable in places such as Singapore and Brunei.

This is just the kind of regularising change that one would expect to occur in the evolution of the language, and as I have argued before (e.g. here and here), it seems that New Englishes are hastening the pace of change, even if many people in the USA and UK are not too happy about this.