Abusing Plurals
Thursday, January 13th, 2005 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturner[prompted by a discussion in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earthemp6's journal]
I am used to watching my students sympathetically as they struggle with the tortuous distinctions between singular and plural in English. It is not just that some plurals are irregular (e.g. "child" / "children"); matters are made worse by nouns which can sometimes take a plural but are uncountable (and hence singular) at other times (e.g. "behaviour" or "cheese"). Occasionally you can even have plurals of plurals, as in "the peoples of the world", which is not quite the same as "the people of the world". Then there is the question of what to do with foreign or archaic words, which I noticed in my students' essays on Aquinas: what is the plural of articulus or objectio? Then there is the translator's preference to leave ad in the Latin, which led to sentences like "There are no ads in this articulus" (it must have been a special subscribers' page).
My general rule for this is to apply English morphology wherever possible. Thus the plural of "virus" is "viruses", not "viri" (and certainly not "virii", which is bad Latin), and the plural of "buddha" is "buddhas", not, er, whatever. Of course some foreign plurals have become entrenched in the language, to the extent that more people know and use the word "bacteria" than its singular, "bacterium". In this case, saying "bacteriums" would sound silly. Sometimes the plural even becomes so common that people start to use it as a singular, hence such monstrosities as "Television is a powerful media."
While this irks me, it is probably unavoidable. It is certainly not unique to English. For example, Turkish has adopted a large number of words from Arabic, and Turks are never sure what to do with the morphology, especially since Turkish is agglutinative (meaning that you change the form of the word by adding bits on the end) while Arabic is, well, weird. Take, for example, the Arabic word for "side", which is taraf in the singular, and etraf in the plural (or maybe the other way round). After struggling with these loan-words, Turks opted for the simple Turkish plural ending -lar. However, they put this on both the singular and plural forms, changing the meaning in the process: taraflar means the two sides of a dispute or game, while etraflar means something like "surroundings".
Anyway, if you are ever tempted to abuse plurals, remember this sentence: "We have a new data, so we need a criteria for detecting virii in this media."
earthemp6's journal]I am used to watching my students sympathetically as they struggle with the tortuous distinctions between singular and plural in English. It is not just that some plurals are irregular (e.g. "child" / "children"); matters are made worse by nouns which can sometimes take a plural but are uncountable (and hence singular) at other times (e.g. "behaviour" or "cheese"). Occasionally you can even have plurals of plurals, as in "the peoples of the world", which is not quite the same as "the people of the world". Then there is the question of what to do with foreign or archaic words, which I noticed in my students' essays on Aquinas: what is the plural of articulus or objectio? Then there is the translator's preference to leave ad in the Latin, which led to sentences like "There are no ads in this articulus" (it must have been a special subscribers' page).
My general rule for this is to apply English morphology wherever possible. Thus the plural of "virus" is "viruses", not "viri" (and certainly not "virii", which is bad Latin), and the plural of "buddha" is "buddhas", not, er, whatever. Of course some foreign plurals have become entrenched in the language, to the extent that more people know and use the word "bacteria" than its singular, "bacterium". In this case, saying "bacteriums" would sound silly. Sometimes the plural even becomes so common that people start to use it as a singular, hence such monstrosities as "Television is a powerful media."
While this irks me, it is probably unavoidable. It is certainly not unique to English. For example, Turkish has adopted a large number of words from Arabic, and Turks are never sure what to do with the morphology, especially since Turkish is agglutinative (meaning that you change the form of the word by adding bits on the end) while Arabic is, well, weird. Take, for example, the Arabic word for "side", which is taraf in the singular, and etraf in the plural (or maybe the other way round). After struggling with these loan-words, Turks opted for the simple Turkish plural ending -lar. However, they put this on both the singular and plural forms, changing the meaning in the process: taraflar means the two sides of a dispute or game, while etraflar means something like "surroundings".
Anyway, if you are ever tempted to abuse plurals, remember this sentence: "We have a new data, so we need a criteria for detecting virii in this media."
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-13 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-13 11:16 pm (UTC)If you pronounced "in vitro" correctly, you would sound like a Russian (Ensign Checkov, to be precise).
no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 09:52 am (UTC)I went to an English Grammar School in the 70s. Latin was a compulsory subject for 3 years.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-16 04:03 pm (UTC)So Cicero is pronounced keek-air-oe, caesar as k-eye-sar.
One I find interesing is that Jove is pronounced Yahweh (near enough).
I think that scheme is called Classical, and the one most often used (sisseroe, seizer) is Ecclesiastical, but I'm not sure.
As to why they taught it, there was a big thing in England about the ruling classes having a classical education. We had to do at least one year of classical (not modern) Greek too. I really don't know why it was considered so important, but I think it must be a tradition going back to the middle ages.
The really daft thing was that by the 70s the school was full of working class boys, like me. By then, the only requirement for entry was a good pass at the 11-Plus (a type of SAT exam taken by 10 year olds), and if you wanted to do maths or any sciences past 16 you had to drop Latin (and all other languages and humanities) anyway.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-16 05:04 pm (UTC)Latin is also on my list of languages I intend to learn if I ever get the time, along with Classical Greek. I feel quite envious that you were learning these in school when I was struggling with German, which is at least as hard as Latin, and of less interest.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-19 05:27 pm (UTC)My guess is that the soft c was an old pronunciation, and dates from a time when Celt wasn't a word in common use (except, perhaps, among Fenians and the like). Then, when it did enter the general vocabulary, it did so through an academic route that used the hard c pronunciation.