euro vs. euros (user search)
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  euro vs. euros (search mode)
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Poll
Question: 2 € = "2 euro" or "2 euros"?
#1
2 euro (I'm British)
#2
2 euro (I'm Irish)
#3
2 euro (I'm American)
#4
2 euro (I'm Canadian)
#5
2 euro (I'm Australian)
#6
2 euros (I'm British)
#7
2 euros (I'm Irish)
#8
2 euros (I'm American)
#9
2 euros (I'm Canadian)
#10
2 euros (I'm Australian)
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Author Topic: euro vs. euros  (Read 3269 times)
angus
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« on: January 14, 2015, 08:06:55 PM »

I know which form is used in legal literature, but the media don't always wanna stick by the statutory provisions. So, do you use the plural or the singular when talking about sums of money?

Interesting question.  I'd always assumed that the plural of euro was euro.  When I have been in places that use the currency I've seen prices I'd instinctively think "five euro" or "six euro" but I often heard people say things like "five euros" or "six euros."  Still, when I said "euro" no one ever corrected me.  Eventually I noticed newspaper articles and such saying "euros" so now I'm confused.  I voted for the third option because it just seems awkward to add the "s" on the end.  Since you're the one who brought it up, please tell us the correct form.  I see lots of posts in this thread, but it's all confusion or opinion or an obnoxious table or two and none of it really seems to answer the question definitively.  Should we say "five euro" or "five euros"? 


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angus
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« Reply #1 on: January 15, 2015, 12:59:31 PM »


I suppose you get used to it.  I thought it was jarring the first time I heard someone say "euros" but eventually I got used to it.  I still don't say it though, because it just seems weird to me, and I'm still not sure which is really correct, despite all the opinions and tables and links in this thread.  

In any case it is not as jarring as seeing posters use a comma for the radix point when they're writing in English.  It's like, you bother to take all the trouble to learn to write and read in English but you can't even take the time to figure out how we write radices?  Encountering a comma used as a radix point when I'm reading English is far more distracting than encountering "s" after euro.  
 
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angus
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« Reply #2 on: January 16, 2015, 10:06:03 AM »

There pretty clearly isn't a correct version, why do you expect there to be one?

I expect that I have pondered for at least a decade the very question asked in the OP, just as I have wondered about a million other things.  What I didn't expect is that I would create a thread about the various and sundry questions which arise daily in my mind.  That a poster has such an interest in a topic as to create a thread on this forum about it would indicate to me that the poster has looked into it--and by "looked into it" I don't mean referenced a dictionary or can find a wikipedia article, I mean really looked into it.  If such threads are to have meaning they require denouement.  Let the OP share the fruits of his own research in his own time.  Right now he's obviously just looking for opinion.  At some point he should, by forum etiquette, after allowing posters to exhaust musings, own the thread.  Anyone can own it, really.  The ratifiers of the Maastrict Treaty could create accounts here, or the chairman of the European Central Bank could--for all I know he already has--and give us a definitive anwswer, but I prefer the First Call approach.  Sort of like, "He who smelt it, dealt it." 

My own instinct tells me that since euro is short for European Currency Unit, then the word "unit" should be pluralized.  1 ECU, 2 or more ECUs.  That makes sense.  Euro is in that sense a modifier, a proper adjective, if you will, that modifies currency.  Euro works as a shorthand whether you're talking about one european currency unit, or more than one european currency units.  Thus my tendency to always have said "euro" whether referring to one or to more than one.  Still, we say things like floppies, even though floppy is an adjective and it should be the noun, disc, that is pluralized.  On this forum, we have taken our cues from The Greatest Poster Of All Time and have begun to use poor as a noun to describe a subclass of toiling humans, thus we ask things like "do poors give their children parties to celebrate their birthdays?" 

Language evolves.  No one disputes that.  I once had a lengthy conversation with an English professor about pluralizing words like referendum and index.  I know how I was taught to do this in school, but I'd been reading more and more in what I'd otherwise consider to be reputable sources some rather jarring forms of pluralization.  (And let's not even get started on how folks have taken to regarding the verb "to dive" as an irregular, stem-changing verb when trying to form its preterite.  Apparently Mark Twain can be blamed for "dove" since he was the first one to have formed the preterite of "to dive" in that way.)  Anyway, she pointed out some important aspects of evolution of language and in any case there were probably better things to worry about than people writing things like "indexes" and "referendums."  Clearly there are also better things to worry about than folks saying "two euros" as well.

As to my expectations in this thread, I only have two:  one is that someone, preferably the OP, will stumble upon a reasoned and well-documented diatribe about the most justifiable form.  That may occur today or tomorrow or five years from now, epiphanies being hard to predict.  The other, of course, is the fact that someone will invariably mention nazis if this thread gets long enough.  One can always expect mention of nazis, eventually.

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