Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
People are welcome to form a fake Latin plural of "virus" if they wish - I just wondered where that extra "i" came from.... What I think is a little bit silly is to "make" up Latin plurals - and even worse, to get them wrong  . |
I understand. And as I said, having a pretty decent amount of Latin study under my belt, I'm also aware that the word is "non-standard" Latin. I'm also a linguist by training (MA, 1985), so I tend to lean pretty heavily toward descriptivism -- that is, what is "right" grammatically is whatever is in common use within a particular community. I don't sweat stuff like "none are", "referencing", split infinitives or sentence-ending prepositions. And I've been known to say "ain't". Occasionally.
This pretty succinctly sums up our little discussion; Wikipedia also tosses its
two cents in. There's even an entire Internet domain devoted to this bit of hack Latin --
www.virii.net.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
"Opera" is itself a plural - it's the plural of "opus" ("work", in the sense of an artistic work)
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Now here's an interesting example. While
opera is plural in classical Latin, that it was treated as singular in many varieties of vulgar Latin is also well attested -- a fact which undoubtedly bent the noses of many sixth and seventh century Latin grammarians. And this is, of course, how the singular
opera passed into Italian and from thence into English.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Once a word is used in English, it ... can legitimately be given an English plural.... I had a rant about Italian plurals in another thread recently. "Paninis" is one that's often seen - people genuinely don't seem to be aware that "panini" is a plural.
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So where does one draw the line? If once a word has passed into English it's become fair game for English plural affixes, then why object to "paninis" but not "agendas"?