neither sentence makes much sense!

if you give in the original German, you will get more help

Half of the 5% live in this village (maybe?)

half of the poorest five percent lives in this village?

whatever it is you're trying to say, it's "half of... lives"

As in: let's see how the other half lives.

curiously according to my dictionary
half can function as sing. or pl. pronoun
as in they, the other half of the 5%
hmmm

manja: yes, it's possible, but when "testing" the matter, in this case "how the other half live/s," google (don't you just love it?) gives me 38,600 for "live" and 294,000 for "lives." Long live google!

I agree with manja. When you use 'half of' as an expression of quantity, it simply functions as an adjective, like 'some of' or 'most of.' The same is true of '___% of.' In both cases, the verb still agrees with the thing counted:

Half of the articles were negative.
Half of the news was discouraging.
75% of the region is poor.
75% of the people are poor.

This is different than in German, where the verb agrees with the literal subject rather than the notional subject.


When the thing counted is itself an expression of quantity, like 'half of the 5%,' you have to think about what it in turn is referring to. Here it's understood to be 'people' or 'them,' and therefore plural:

Half of that 75% live in houses without mosquito nets. (<— people)<br/>Half of that 75% is located in a flood plain. (<— region)<br/>
That is, it's the people who live; it's the region that is located somewhere.


'Half' is always singular only when it means an actual thing:

This half of the room is sunny; that half is shady.

In this sense, of course, it's countable and can have a plural:

Both halves of the room are dusty.


There are many, many discussions in the archive on singular/plural agreement, and many explanations and examples online on ESL websites.

*f5* Sorry, had to go make an urgent pot of coffee. That is, urgently had to go ... Never mind.

@dude: True enough -- but think about the understood referent. In the expression 'how the other half lives,' I would say we usually understand that to mean either 'the other half of the world' or 'the other half of the population' (singular), not 'the other half of the people' (plural). So 'lives' is indeed more idiomatic -- but you could technically construe it either way.

There might even be a BE/AE difference as well, if BE regards 'the other half' as a collective noun with a plural sense, like 'the management/team/government are ...' I confess I have trouble getting a feel for exactly which BE nouns fall in this category, and even among BE speakers, opinion sometimes seems to vary.