Use of the word "women" on the internet

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For some reason I keep noticing when people on the internet say "a women" when I would expect to see "a woman". If this were a simple typo, I would expect to see people saying "a men" instead of "a man" just as frequently, but I don't. Is there some kind of PC-reason for this that I'm missing?

 

Women is plural...More than one

Woman is singular...One

Probably typos.

 

My guess is, as non English-speaker, I make this mistake often.

man -> men
woman -> women

That's a pretty difficult rule to always remember and never to confuse, when your own language builds the plural in case in a different way, I guess that's nearly all others languages. And it's an exception from the usual way that in western languages the plural is build -> mans, womans

 

Irregular plural seems difficult in English probably because it's so unusual - not like in the languages where you have multiple declinational patterns. Another example is plural adjectives. They're only put in plural when their function in the sentence is that of a noun

You should also remember that native speakers are hooked on phonics and need a special reflex roll to spell correctly.

 

I'd think it was a typo, or confusion by non-English speakers - but I can't remember seeing the same mistake made with man/men. Maybe it's just that people spot and correct typos in short words more often.

 

Maybe it's just that alot of people can't spell

 

Earlier, I used to think, correct singular would be:

man
women

 

Now, the real question is when does it stop being just poor english, and turn into Engrish?

I think there needs to be a list made, and once a sentence or paragraph hits so many items on the list, it is defined as "Engrish".

I want a bumper sticker that says "Engrish 4 Life".

 

Yeah English is one of the hardest langauges. All that grammer rules and expections. Its Not as striaght out as other languages.

 

As Something Corporate perfectly illustrates

 

Estonian is hard. Try learning that.

English isn't that hard for me. It's like a natural to me. Kinda.

 

English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Some problematic issues are the incredible number of tenses (past participle, present perfect) and different rules for pluralization (mouse, mice; house, houses). Even adjectives require an order. For example: It is a big red house. In other languages, you can switch the order of 'big' and 'red.' In English, "It is a red big house," would be wrong. One learns English by speaking and reading it often. Someone proficient in English can tell if there is something wrong even in the sentence or phrase seems correct.

 

Charlie, I would really argue that point you made. Yes, there are a lot of traps and tricks in English. But every language has a lot of traps and tricks. A not mother tongue speaker of English will always have problems with the fine finesses of English. But the same happens in other languages. I personally know no other language than English, which can be learned so fast. Or on the other way around: People here usually learn: German, French, Italian, Spanish and English. All other languages except English, take a whole lot of time to even get on a level, where someone actually is able to take part in a conversation. I think it's fair to say, that it approx. needs 3 times the effort in time and work, that it needs to learn English.

The one with the red, big house is a minor problem. Master the own language, is something that takes a lot of effort itself, mastering a foreign language, is something which is studied on an university.

 

I never said that English was the hardest. Check my post. At any rate, French, Italian, German and Spanish are similar in sentence structure. IIRC, they are all Romance languages. My French teacher in university spoke all of them. Perhaps we can make a poll to see what language is difficult to learn.

It may be minor but it will still be wrong and mastering a language is best done in the country where it is widely spoken.

 

Ooops, yes, that's true. I was focussing on "learning".

 

I believe that one of the reasons that English is so difficult is the abundance of borrowing that has taken place over the years. There are words that are descendents and/or bastardizations of many, many other languages mixed into English, sometimes in combination. Source langauges that come to mind are: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Native American, Yiddish, German, and Italian. That's off the top of my head.

I think that this explains a lot of the exceptions that are found in the language. The intermingling of the rules of various languages has produced and real mess! It also explains some of the differences between American English and British English.

I'm sure that other languages have gone through a similar evolution, but has it been done to the same extent?

FYI - I am fluent only in English, but studied French in school and have married into a first generation Mexican family.