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

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:

>At 1:35 pm -0500 5/2/01, Padraic Brown wrote:
>>On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
>>
>>>And if the answer to both the above questions is "no", then these people
>>>are lacking in logic as well as literacy.
>>
>>While I commiserate, I think you may be over harsh with these
>>people. By in large, they are not linguists nor Latinists.
>
>Nothing to do with being a linguist or Latinist.  It is logic.  Final -s
>_never_ becomes -i in any standard plural formation.
I think we'll have to disagree here. It has nothing to do with
"logic", because the phenomenon is largely a facetious one -
or one of ignorance - the people who use these forms (like ignorami)
are not serious. Also, only those who know the rules can form
"logical" plurals (i.e., ignoramora).

Just in case --> ;)

>>They have vague notions of how the western Classical languages
>>treat plurals. They then apply them often facetiously and almost
>
>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?

>
>If such people actually paid more attention to _English_ (i.e. their own
>language), they would discover:
>1. Their are some words ending in -us which, in technical usage, change the
>-us to -i, e.g. locus, loci; fungus, fungi; radius, radii; cactus, cacti
>etc.
>2. Their are some words ending in -is which have -es in the plural, e.g.
>crisis, crises; analysis, analyses; thesis, theses; parenthesis,
>parentheses etc.
>
>By applying 1, they could arrive at *viri (but don't) which, tho as
>incorrect as *prospecti, is at least an understandable derivation.
>By applying 2, they would arrive at _penes_ which is correct, tho not
>common in English.
Well, there's your problem! "People" don't often apply logic
to such matters, it would seem.

Padraic.

>Ray.