pluralization...
Have a look at the following excerpts of company descriptions that some of my
business students wrote in an exam:
• The customer of our company are end-consumer, not the industry.
• We also have a little home-delivery service to deliver our products to our customer at home. At
the moment we employ 45 especially motivated and ambitious employee and 10 trainee.
• We procure our electronic goods directly from the biggest producer worldwide, for example
Samsung, Sony, Apple, and a lot of other electronics manufacturer.
• Saturn has been very successful in the past few years and has been in the position to compete
with online retailer like Amazon.
• Our supplier is Volkswagen AG; the parts the car dealer order are from Original Teile Logistik and
also from Volkswagen Genuine Parts.
• Being the best employer and having the most satisfied customer, our future prospects and plans
are to sell the most cars of all automobile manufacturer.
• We have over 200 service centre, which are spread all over Germany.
• I work at McDonald’s in Nuremberg, a major and well-known chain of fast-food restaurant with
its headquarters in Munich, Germany. We sell fast food directly to the end-consumer, in particular
hamburger, but also fries, shakes, salads and wraps.
• Our company is a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG, which has an interest of 55%. The remaining 45%
are held by other owner, for example large car dealer.
• We are in the retail trade and sell groceries mainly to end-consumers, but also to a number of
restaurant owner.
• The promotional measures of the retailers on the radio, on TV and in daily newspaper have
affected the turnover positively.
• Dinea is a chain of restaurants located in the department stores, which sell freshly cooked food
for the customer of Galeria Kaufhof and Inno.
I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but this is a phenomenon I’ve been observing
ever since I started teaching English: German students appear to be allergic to
plural forms! The reason for this is that many nouns in German don’t have a
distinct plural form. This is in particular the case with nouns that end in “-er” (e.g.
Lehrer, Techniker, Autohändler, Leitz-Ordner, Flaschenöffner), and nouns that
stand for units of measure (e.g. Kilometer, Liter, Pfund, Volt, Dollar).
This is for the record:
In English, nearly every noun has a plural form,
and if we are talking about more than one of
whatever it is, we need to use the plural form!
(There are the usual exceptions, of course, like certain animals [e.g. fish, sheep, deer, moose];
and certain currencies [e.g. rand, yen, yuan].)