Re: YAEPT: uu/ii (< Quick Latin pronunciation question)

Den 27. mai. 2008 kl. 14.42 skreiv Benct Philip Jonsson:
>
> Indeed. In Classical Latin _uirus_ was/is an
> uncountable mass noun meaning 'slime, poison'. I
> guess that if one wanted to say 'viruses' in
> classicistic Latin one would have to use a
> circumlocution like _genera uiri_, where _uiri_ is
> the genitive singular. Moreover the plural, if
> there were any, would have been _uira_, since the
> word is neuter in spite of being a second
> declension noun in _-us_!
The Breton word 'viruz' is no doubt borrowed from Latin. Like the
Latin word it's an uncountable collective. But Breton has an
interesting and very useful tool in the singulative ending -enn,
which turns its many collective nouns into single instances, in this
case 'viruzenn' (a virus), with a plural 'viruzennoù' (viruses).

In Welsh, the -en ending fulfills the same function. But Latin
doesn't have a singulative I guess, otherwise it would have been used
to form the modern virus word.

LEF