Comment on Why do people say "my taxes"
akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Interestingly, in my language, it’s an uncountable noun, thus we say “pay the tax”, even though it contains all the subcategories of the various types of taxes.
Comment on Why do people say "my taxes"
akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Interestingly, in my language, it’s an uncountable noun, thus we say “pay the tax”, even though it contains all the subcategories of the various types of taxes.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 week ago
That’s an interesting linguistic point - so tax in your language would use “less/more” being uncountable.
Technically, in English, taxes should be fewer/greater (being a countable dollar thing), but we often say “less”. Prescription vs description in action!
akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
That’s right! We say “pay more/less tax” and “have you declared the tax?”, for instance. Although, I am not speaking from a standardized or school grammar perspective. This is just how I - as a native speaker - would use our equivalent of the word “tax”. This brings me back HARD. To times when I used to join various panel discussions to fiercly defend the/my stance on “correct language” - my vague stance being that the ruling classes need to let the actual spoken word and its usage to be reflected back into the academic discourse. End of off topic discussion.