Saturday, July 2, 2011

Two bees, or not two bees?

While reading through Penny Arcade this morning, I came across a discussion on Double Fine's new game Trenched, which led to some interesting linguistic research.

The game offers the ability to customize your character, which Tycho says can result in
"[l]umbering Assault murderwalkers that emit doom, (comparatively) lithe Engineering chassis that deal the bulk of their damage with Heavy Turrets and cheap upgrades, or Standard cores that split the difference."

It's not often that you hear the word "chassis" used in general conversation, much less the plural form, which led me to question what the actual plural of the noun is. Is Tycho correct in his usage here? A quick trip to Dictionary.com gave me the surprising results.

"Chassis" is the correct spelling of both the singular and plural forms. In this aspect, the word falls into the same category as nouns like "moose" and "deer." "Chassis," however, has the unique distinction that, while spelled the same, the two forms are actually pronounced differently, probably due to the French influence. Dictionary.com gives the pronunciation for the singular as [chas'-ee, -is, shas'-ee] and the plural as [chas'-eez, shas'-].

If anyone out there is aware of other nouns like this, I'd love to hear about them!

Source: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/7/1/
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chassis

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