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

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?

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo
Conlang code:
CU !lh:m cN:R:S:G a+ y n2d:1d !R* A-- E L* N1 Id:m k- ia- p+ m- o+ P-- d* b+++ lainesco