Minutes / Dollars

1 & 2. They are obviously counting the minutes, so 'there are two...'.

3 & 4. Four hundred coins in a wallet is extremely bulky and awkward if not impossible, so let us ignore that option. 'There's 400 dollars in my wallet' (folding money, of course)-- the speaker is probably considering the sum, a single amount.' Nevertheless, I think a native speaker is about as likel

1 & 2. They are obviously counting the minutes, so 'there are two...'.

I notice that a lot of websites use 'is...minutes' not 'are...minutes' .


This website for eg.:
[url="http://www.gov.mb.ca/health/ems/emt.html"]
[/url]

Maybe the 2 minutes are considered as one length of time? a kind of unit?

You can take my opinion or that of the Manitoba Health Services, Jack. I am not teaching what 'everyone says', I am teaching what is best for formal writing and test taking.

Hello

Jack's question is interesting. I've four grammar books and what they say is in agreement with Mr Mic and Pieanne. So Jack's sentence would be incorrect as a standard expression of English. But it is also true many people online are taking plural seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years as a singular noun. I was interested in people's choice between the plural and si

And Paco's answer is interesting. I am not sure the results are not arbitrary-- I mean as to statistical differences between ratios for different units-- just because there are not many of any of the hits, really.

But more interestingly, I don't understand your point about pronunciation, Paco. Are you saying that the similarity between /se k?nd/ and /se k?ndz/ is greater than that betw

Hi Mr Mic

Thank you for the comment. To my ears, se kond and se kondz sound similar though I feel the former a bit softer. It would be because my ears are not well fit to English listening [actually my ears are so bad]. As you suggest, the sample sizes are a bit too small to validate them as linguistic data, but even if I change the number, the results are not so different. So suppose

To tell you the truth, Paco, I interpret your results as meaning that website posters don't much care which form of the verb they use-- and why should they?-- the message is clear, all the same. Just as 'I ain't got no peanut butter' is a clear message indicating a lack of Skippy.

What I was asking about the pronunciation was: if 'second' and 'seconds' sound similar, then how does that

Hello Mr Micawber

Thank you. But frankly I am not quite sure about what you mean by "I ain't ... skippy". You know I'm so bad at colloquial English, so... If you mean people online are using wrong English, I can agree someway. What I was interested in was how and why people make such mistakes in number -verb agreement. It's just my curiosity. However, this kind talk seems to make nothin

I guess Skippy (there's a capital) must be a brand/label/made of peanuts butter MrM may be fond of!