Some dictionaries list “angsts”, but only as the third person singular of the verb ‘to angst’, as in “He angsts over his problems”. But no dictionary lists it as a plural of the noun ‘angst’, as in “Abused children present with many varied angsts”. Or is it better to just cacti the noun, and use the root language (German) plural “angsten”?
Do, or should, the self-appointed language czars have the power to just declare that a noun has no plural just because it looks funny or is hard to say? Angstises?
I’ve never thought about this before, but this seems to extend well beyond angst.
Some quick observations:
Many (most?) nouns for emotional states do not have plurals:
dread, optimism, happiness, boredom, guilt, despair, serenity, confidence, anger.
But a few do have plurals where they can be associated with multiple specific causes:
anxieties, worries, frustrations, insecurities
(I’m talking about nouns for the emotional states here, not the objects of the emotional state: I harbor anxieties; I feel frustrations, etc.)
Oddly, I can’t yet think of any plural states with positive connotations. We feel frustrations over politics and dating (I think that’s colloquial?); but we do not feel loves for our mother and chocolate. (We do talk about our loves and our joys, but these plurals do not refer to the emotional states, they refer to the objects of joy and love.)
I’m not sure that I can yet discern any consistent pattern between the obligate singulars and the plurals. Why is it that I can harbor anxieties over x, y and x simultaneously; but I can only harbor dread of one thing at a time?
I’m sure some linguists must have thought about this much more extensively, I’ll have a hunt around.
British English, but I live in the US. I sometimes get confused about whether an expression is colloquial in either dialect! Am I mistaken in what I wrote above? I was kind of “thinking out loud”, it was not carefully considered.
Well, you seem to be missing out the part where a neologism “catches on”. Language is a dynamic process of spontaneous consensus-building. But just making up stuff and saying it doesn’t make it part of a dialect.
You definitely didn’t think these through. Most, if not all, of them can be pluralized. Admittedly, it’s not all that common to do so, but you can find situations when they are.
I’m in the middle of watching an important football game, so I don’t have time to make up some examples, but here in an entire discussion in another forum about “happinesses”. The conclusion there is that it’s cromulent.
Never trust a machine translation this way. In this case it delivered only the nearest approximation, as “angsten” could be interpreted as “Ängsten”, which is a variant of the plural of “Angst”, the dative form to be precise.
ETA: if you switch the direction in google translator, it gives “Ängste” as correct translation of “fears”.
Ok, further reflections on the countability of emotion nouns in general:
First of all, I’m calling “phooey” on dtilque’s claim that these can be plural except in unusual or convoluted sentences:
dread, optimism, happiness, boredom, guilt, despair, serenity, confidence, anger
I feel dreads about x, y & z
etc.
It seems to me that the general rule is that most emotion or state-of-mind nouns are uncountable.
The question, then, is why the optionally-countable exceptions:
I feel anxiety/anxieties about x, y & z
I can’t find anything from Language Log or anywhere else that I usually look. So, my speculation is that it’s just a quirk deriving from the semantics, the type of emotion involved. When we talk about “dread” the state of mind itself is more the focus, and it’s generally similar whatever the cause; whereas anxiety can vary more, and the focus is more on the cause, different anxieties for the particular thing(s) that we are worried about.
That’s all I’ve got. I still can’t come up with any good examples of positive emotions that are countable, except the dubios “joys”.
