Geoff again:
...holy fuck "multiple" in English was exclusively an adjective until like, mid 1980s!! it only became a determiner *this* recently!! before that you only find "multiple" as in "multiple choice" or "multiple fracture", never as in "multiple people" or "multiple times" (and if you did find it, it would have meant something adjectival, like the modern "plural person" or similar—one of the first occurrences of "multiple people" was in "well, the database has multiple people", which then meant "well, the database has people with duplicated records in it").
that means that for anyone who acquired English before this development (within my lifetime!), expressions like "multiple of these actors" probably sounded syntactically weird (partitives don't occur with adjectives, only determiners; "two of these actors" or "many of these actors" occur, but not *"blue of these actors" or *"plural of these actors"). for me, who learned English as my second language in the 90s, it sounds as normal and unremarkable as "many of these actors". I probably barely missed the window where I would have gotten the previous version of English.
for people not into this kink, I'll clarify that getting a new determiner is a pretty rare development, this is "once in a hundred years comet" for linguists. determiners are a closed class, so they seldomly get new ones—Wikipedia only lists some 60-something total determiners for English (and it's still missing "multiple").
#linguistics
