"Tables sizes" - why is it wrong? [duplicate]
For example, "Tables sizes" as far as I know, is wrong. Correct is "Table sizes". But it may mean either "sizes of the one table" or "sizes of many tables". How to specify that I want to say about many tables?
What rule is used there? Where can I read more about it?
Solution 1:
There are two ways in English grammar to indicate possession.
- One is called "the Saxon genitive" (to indicate its origin as a Germanic noun case), and appears as an "apostrophe S" in writing. Technically, this morpheme is the inflectional suffix
{-Z₂}, with three allomorphs /-s/, /-z/, and /-əz/, identical in form with the noun plural suffix{-Z₁}and with the 3rd person singular present tense verb suffix{-Z₃}.
(Parenthetically, it's always seemed odd to me that, of the only 8 or 9 inflectional suffixes left in English, three are identical. I suspect this is just a symptom of inflectional death)
- The other way of expressing possession in English grammar is called "the Romance genitive" (to indicate its origin as the Latin preposition de, with various compounds), and it uses the English equivalent of de, namely a prepositional phrase with of.
Either one can be used, in most cases, but there is a strong tendency to use (1) with human possessors and (2) with non-human possessors, e.g:
- Bill's/the man's/Fido's leg
- the leg of the table/the trip/the argument
Note that most metaphoric uses of possession use of; abstract and formal sentences are apt to contain more Romance-derived words as well as a Romance genitive. Generally speaking, Germanic influences in English are shorter, earthier, and more common than Romance influences in English; this is not limited to grammar and vocabulary.
So, getting to the question, why is tables sizes wrong? First, we're talking about tables here, not people, so we wouldn't use a Saxon genitive. Thus
- sizes of tables
works fine. And that's the answer to your question about how you specify that more than one table was sized.
But putting tables in front of sizes complicates things even more. Unlike the situation in Romance languages, an English modifier must not agree with a plural noun it modifies. Even though no one buys only one shoe at a shoe store, it's still not a *shoes store.
This rule applies with any one-word modifier that goes before the noun; it's part of what's sometimes called "the eleven-year-old boy rule" because of the opposition
- an eleven-year-old boy ~ a boy eleven years old
This example shows how hyphens are used to make the phrase eleven years old into a single word, so that it can precede the noun, and also how the plural marker is removed because preposed modifiers can't be plural.