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There seems to be a confusion between singular and plurals. For example, "Initially, a diverse body of people were described as noblemen..." "A diverse body of people" is a singular entity, therefore it "was described". Similarly, in the first sentence of the precis on the front page today, "The Hungarian nobility were initially a diverse body of people..." is also a singularity, so the verb should be "was".
This is a very common occurrence - even the BBC does it. It often talks about a football team in the plural ("Manchester United are... etc), which grates as much as if I had written "...even the BBC do it..." in the first sentence of this paragraph. 81.102.20.141 (talk) 10:41, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The BBC do it because that is grammatically correct in British English, where teams, groups, etc. are described in plural form instead of in singular form. Epicgenius (talk) 17:03, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
81.102.20.141, hi. It's a shame that you don't have a user name.
I've been dying to figure this out ever since I encountered it, also with the BBC. I'm fluent in a Latin and a Germanic language, and both apply the rule you are claiming for English, too. However, the BBC staff, largely Oxbridge educated or inspired, does quite consistently apply the variant cited by Epicgenius. I know that, unlike Romanian or German, English has no central body making authoritative decisions about what's right and wrong, so I'm confused. Is this apparent dissonance
the primary rule
an allowed variant
a mistake, but widely used and well-accepted
a mistake which somewhat disqualifies you as an educated English-speaker?
Maybe there are BE vs AE differences on top of a possible common approach?
I'd find it very useful. I'm familiar with about a dozen aristocratic families from Transylvania, but have no idea how many there were in total, where some originated from, and even which of these important families were considered as part of the upper echelon and which not. A list would be a good starting base for further research and articles. Anyone? Maybe Hung. Wiki does have one already? Köszönöm! Arminden (talk) 13:46, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
