Bad Latin 101: The Double-Plural of Neuter Nouns

To a discussion board for mental health issues, I posted this...

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[snip all but last paragraphs]

Anyway, one mixed episode, or one manic episode, results in automatic
diagnosis of bipolar I according to the DSM-IV manual in the US. Don't know
what the European criteriae* for manic/mixed episode and bipolar disoder
are.

*okay, bad Latin grammar. It's a "double plural" of the neuter-gender noun
_criterium_. That's when you form the plural of a neuter noun (-um > -a),
then treat the plural noun like a feminine singular in -a and make *that* a
plural (-a > -ae). So it's the plural of a plural -- in this case, a plural
number of groups of criteria, each group being related to a diagnosis of
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Now look what I did. I formed the plural of _criterium_, a neuter noun,
which is _criteria_. Then I treated that as a feminine singular noun and
turned that into a plural: _*criteriae_.

I don't think the case paradigms for masculine plural and feminine singular
are the same, so this only works for nominative case. At least. The use for
this unconventionalily in Latin would be to denote plurals of plurals, or
more precisely, plurals of collectives.

Now this will be really exciting if I tried it with Russian...

http://www.geocities.com/dawier


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