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

Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 09:47:36PM -0500, Padraic Brown wrote:
> > On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
> > >Things applied facetiously are one thing - but the abusers of _virii_
>and
> > >_penii_ quoted here seem to use these things thinking that (a) they are
>the
> > >correct forms, and (b) they are clever to do so.
> >
> > Add 'ignorantly' to the list, then. Clearly, to those of as know
> > the "rules", -ii can not come from -us. Why the extra -i- gets
> > stuck in there - who knows?
>
>I'd assume it's from words like radii, although I don't know of many like
>that, and assume they're probably pretty rare in English. But it does kind
>of suggest to me a process of analogy; and as we know, analogy could take
>place in any language, and sometimes words re-formed by analogy become the
>"standard" forms of the language. But you don't hear us griping about the
>Romans themselves replacing <arbos> with <arbor>, now do we?
The thing about _radii_ is that the pl ending is still only _-i_. If
_radius_ pluralizes as __radii_, then analogy would produce _viri_ as the pl
of _virus_. If _virii_ was correct, then the pl of _radius_ would ought to
be _radiii_!

                                          Andreas
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.