Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 December 7

= December 7 =

Sport(s) in the UK
Category:Sports organisations of the United Kingdom and many of its immediate subcategories use "sports". I was under the impression that "sports" was standard en:gb only when used as the plural form of a word that refers to a specific kind of event, i.e. you can say "football and cricket are separate sports", but you'd only ever say "sport organisations" or "sporting organisations". Does this category tree need to be renamed per WP:TIES, or have I misunderstood? Nyttend (talk) 00:27, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
 * In the UK I've definitely only heard sports (or sporting) in that context. "Sport organisations" never.--Shantavira|feed me 09:49, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
 * And for an example: The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea - Sports organisations. Alansplodge (talk) 14:14, 7 December 2018 (UTC)


 * you're right that "sports" is usually treated as the plural of "sport" in the UK; and that a noun used attributely in a noun phrase does not usually take a plural ending. But the latter rule is not universal: consider "pants pocket" (10 times as many hits in the iWeb corpus as "pant pocket"), and "glasses case". --ColinFine (talk) 19:13, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Although we Britons don't have pockets in our pants, but we do have them in our trousers. Alansplodge (talk) 11:48, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I know,, but unfortunately "trouser pocket" would not have helped my argument. --ColinFine (talk) 00:10, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I am sure I heard my mother and grandmother in the dim and distant past talk about keeping a hanky in their knicker pocket! 217.33.150.21 (talk) 15:08, 10 December 2018 (UTC)


 * ColinFine -- as I said in a recent answer on this board (now transferred to archives), the first noun in a noun-noun compound in English is not usually plural unless the plural has an irregular form, or the meaning of the plural is significantly different from the meaning of the singular. "Women friends" is an example of the first, "pants pocket" an example of the second (since "pants", also "glasses" etc, are pluralia tantum).  If in some dialects "sports" has a significantly different meaning than "sport", that would allow "sports organization"... AnonMoos (talk) 15:41, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:59, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
 * In the US we never say “sport organization”–it’s always “sports organization”. Here “sports” is a collective noun. For example, “I like sports” means what I think the British would say as “I like sport”. Loraof (talk) 23:31, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Not so. “I like sports” is perfect British English. Alansplodge (talk) 11:48, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Is there any shade of nuance that makes "I like sport" mean something (even subtly) different from "I like sports"?  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:50, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
 * They seem to be interchangeable, but perhaps one of our resident grammarians may correct me on that. For instance, National School Sport Week in the UK has been erroneously rendered as National School Sports Week by a number of schools without any apparent change in the meaning, and The Association for Physical Education uses both versions in the same article. I would say "sports week" given the choice, but perhaps I have unwittingly adopted an Americanism - there's a lot of it about. Alansplodge (talk) 19:11, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
 * From what I can determine about British usage, 'sporting in general' is sport (as is 'one particular sport'), while 'two or more more specific sports' is sports, but the usage is in flux, just leaning (less so over time) toward sport the more generalized the reference (and interpretation) is. This probably explains the National School Sport[s] Week thing mentioned above; it was named with 'sporting in general' in mind, but to some school administrators it would imply 'those sports, and only those sports, we engage in at our schools', a plural but specific thing, so they would naturally add the -s to it. A construction like "the two related sport of pool and snooker" is non-idiomatic in British English, as in American. The dialectal split has to do with the origin of the word, which originally referred to hunting especially for the thrill of the chase rather than for sustenance (from Middle English disport, desport, 'to amuse or entertain [especially oneself]'), then later to contests of physical skill like wrestling and boxing, on which people would gamble ("He gives good sport", etc.). Our modern notion didn't exist yet; competitive games of the common people were suppressed for centuries in the West, especially rough team ones, which sometimes resulted in the sending of troops to put an end to them as "riots". This was primarily for peasant productivity reasons (i.e., "they're not doing their work"), often with hand-having about such activities being ungodly, though the earliest recorded versions many of our modern sports were actually developed by the clergy as pastimes within their own cloister walls, and others by the nobility). They were not called "sport[s]" until much later, and words for the new concept were sometimes just invented (e.g. French and many other language borrowed sport directly from English, while the Real Academia Española settled on deporte pl. deportes by going back to the Latin root.)  Sport had taken on a broader meaning of 'competitive pastime' (and was used as a count noun for this) before the American and British English fork solidified in the early 19th c. (sport pl. sports was used in this sense at least as early as James I of England's Declaration of Sports, 1617–1618, while Webster's first dictionary of American English came out in 1828). Americans were more prone to say hunting for hunting. The hunting-related meaning survived with more currency in British English, to the present day (e.g. hunters are fairly often, though decreasingly, called sportsmen there, but it rarely conveys that meaning in US English, mostly just surviving in a few magazine titles).  This likely accounts for sport as a mass noun in BrEng; sport is (also decreasingly) and always had been a class of activity there, like chemistry and exploration and war, while a sport (like a war) is now and after ca. 1600, maybe earlier, a more discrete thing. Americans mostly lost the first sense, then later back-formed sports as mass noun for the general class, too, not just a plural of the singular case, and this then spread back into British, etc., dialects. You can see it happen in this N-gram: after a century of stability, with "sports" comparatively rarely used in BrEng (surely for plurals of the singular sense) it shot up in usage from around 1930 onward, while usage of sport declined simultaneously (losing a sense). In modern sport[s]-heavy writing from 1960 onward, the two words have been almost neck-and-neck, indicating a decrease in usage of sport as other than a specific singular in British publishing. If you compare the American N-gram, you see sports completely overtake sport, indicating that the usage of the latter as as a general-class mass noun died out in American English entirely before 1940.  At a not-quite-blind guess, I would suggest that the proximal cause of the shift was the world's rapt attention to the 1936 Olympics (in an era when radios had finally become ubiquitous among the non-destitute, and there was live, in-depth coverage of the Olympics for the first time,  it was the most politicized Olympic Games ever, held in Hitler's Germany). At a multi-sport event like this, the dividing line between sport as a class and sports as a plural for particular sporting disciplines would have been especially thin.

about sole proprietorship company
how to search proprietorship companies which are donot have a websites? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.206.13.29 (talk) 05:53, 7 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Websites such as quickcompany.in should give a list of directors for companies in India, but please don't use this as a Wikipedia reference. If a company does not have a website then it is probably not notable in the Wikipedia sense, though there might be exceptions  if the company has been written about in independent WP:Reliable sources.   Dbfirs  07:39, 7 December 2018 (UTC)