Re: CHAT: Worse Greek 102 (was: Bad Latin 101)

At 5:45 pm -0800 4/2/01, Barry Garcia wrote:
>CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>>People make this kind of mistake irritatingly often in the US. If I had a
>>nickel for every teacher I've heard say "parenthese" (/p@"rEnT@si/)
>
>
>In a chatroom i visit, people insist on pluralizing penis as penii.
What degree of illiteracy is that?

Do they imagine that final -s becomes -i in the plural?  bus - bui; atlas -
atlai; crisis - crisii; ass - asi?

Or do they think that _penis_ is a contraction of *penius?

And if the answer to both the above questions is "no", then these people
are lacking in logic as well as literacy.

As illiterates they are clearly not aware of: crisis - crises; analysis -
analyses; parenthesis - parentheses.  Or if they are aware, then then their
lack of logic is even greater than I imagined.

>even
>though i tell them that "penises" is the plural!
Quite so - that is the English plural.
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At 2:44 am +0000 5/2/01, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
[...]
>
>The Latin plural is penes. But even medical professionals seldom find
>occasion to use that. (Pt pres w 2 infl penes... not too likely).
Yep - just like 'crisis - crises' etc - even tho all my examples above are
ultimately from Greek.

What's wrong with good ol' English plurals?  Why do people who clearly have
no Latin (and less Greek!), affect pseudo-Latin (or pseudo-Greek) plurals
and thus reveal themselves to be pretensious fools?

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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