Question:
When do you use the word 'informationS'?
anonymous
2009-05-29 01:16:40 UTC
Isn't 'information' an uncountable noun? Why is it that we have to pluralise it any further? Sounds pretty strange to me as we hardly use 'informations'.

Also, it is used correctly in this sentence?
"Informations about the H1N1 virus.'

Thanks
Juicebox
Three answers:
walmeis
2009-05-29 01:26:00 UTC
Information is a collective noun, so is never properly pluralized.



This is an error commonly committed by many non-native speakers—particularly Asians—since it runs counter to "rules" English appears to have.
?
2009-05-29 08:48:22 UTC
I cannot even think of a time when I have heard someone use the pseudo-word "informations." The only circumstance under which I can imagine its use would be in technical programming languages. For example, maybe a computer understands the word "information" only to mean one piece of information, because whoever designed that program defined it as such during programming. So, later, when people were using the program, they typed something about "information," and the program could not understand that they wanted more than one piece of information, so they just added the word "informations" to the programming and got used to using the pseudo-word in this fashion. Maybe these people think in the programming language so much that they used the pseudo-word in other contexts.



Otherwise, if someone says "informations," they either speak English as a second language and haven't yet grasped the difference between nouns that require pluralization and ones that are uncountable (as you put it,) or they are just very stupid English-speakers who probably have something severely wrong with their brains, because they haven't learned their own native language through hearing it. Grammatical rules are hard-wired into our brains. (Rules for specific languages, of course, are not, but the ability to learn the grammar of a certain language without any cognitive processes is.) So people who cannot figure out that "informations" is not a word probably have brain damage and had mothers who smoked crack when pregnant with their inbred babies or something. Oh, or maybe very young children would say "informations."



You really shouldn't ask why "you" or "we" pluralize "information," since I don't, and if "we" includes you, you should ask the people with whom you associate that you hear saying that, because, unless they are brain-damaged imbeciles, they know something that I don't. It could be some sort of slang.
Bethany
2009-05-29 08:21:47 UTC
It is an uncountable noun. Informations is wrong in every context I can think of. It's a common error for non-native speaking students.


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