I’ve been studying Latin for a really long time. So I’ve seen lots of people screw it up in various ways when they try to get cutesy and clever and insert Latin into their English sentences. One of the things people screw up all the time is forming the plurals of Latin nouns which have passed into English usage. There’s probably a dozen different rules for forming Latin plurals, but people will think everything just ends in i. Those people would be wrong.
Think about it: the normal rule in English is to use the letter s. But tons of words break that rule. You wouldn’t say, “Come over here, childs, and have some ice cream.” Everyone would think you’re an idiot, although I’m sure they’d forgive you if you gave them ice cream. (I know I would. Ice cream makes me forgive all wrongs. Especially if the ice cream is Breyer’s chocolate with some Smuckers marshmallow topping. You could kick me in the shin twenty times but if you apologized and gave me ice cream I’d be okay.)* And when you screw up Latin plurals, it’s basically the same think, except that instead of everyone thinking you’re an idiot, the 1% of people who actually know their Latin declensions** will think you’re an idiot. Which I guess isn’t as much of a problem as having everyone think you’re an idiot, but that 1% is way cooler and smarter than everyone else. So really, you want to impress us.
So, what are some of the rules? Well, it’s true that one of the most common is that a word that ends in -us changes to an i. (Take alumnus/alumni as an example.) But many -us words don’t form plurals that way, and no other ending is ever going to be pluralized with an i. One time someone posted on a message board making “Elvis” into “Elvi.” No. For starters, the name Elvis is of northern European origin—not even remotely Latin—so there’s no reason to stick a Latin plural on it. And even if it were Latin, it would most likely be a third declension i-stem, with plural form “Elves.” (That would be pronounced with two syllables, not like the plural of “elf.”)
There’s lots of other rules, some simple, some more complicated. And if you want to learn Latin, then by all means do so. But there’s a much simpler way than spending years of your life learning a dead language. It’s called opening a dictionary. (Of course, these days, you can just use google, but same difference.) That magical device tells you the plural form of every word. For example. if you wanted to talk about your facebook statuses, you wouldn’t say “stati.” (Alas, I have seen people write this.) That’s because the Latin word “status” doesn’t have “stati” as its plural, it has “status” as its plural. (The vowel actually changes from short to long, and it’d be too complicated to explain how it’s in a different declension and thus has a different (nominative) plural form, but you should definitely not write “stati.”) Theoretically, you could just use status as the plural, but why would you want to do that when “statuses” removes the singular/plural ambiguity? The dictionary on google doesn’t yet mention the plural form of “status,” as it doesn’t yet record the use of “status” in the sense of “status message.” But there are other similar examples.
So, in summary, the next time you want to use a Latin plural on an English word, look it up in a dictionary before you make an ass of yourself.
* Please don’t actually do this, though.
** You may have come to this footnote thinking you were going to get a definition of the word “declension.” Here it is.
I think it’s even worse when someone tells you that he or she is an alumni of a school. Really? Do you have split personality disorder? There’s a word that people should look up and know how to use. They ought to put a little blurb about it on the graduation day programs just so that everyone doesn’t look like a fool and drag their alma mater down by association.
Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. I hate it when I see that.
Here in England we are surrounded by incorrect usage and grammar, often involving the incorrect construction or use of plurals, and often by apparently educated people. (as an aside, I had a vague memory of 4th declension plurals being of the form Statu without the S….but a Google check showed you to be correct) This is in all foreign languages, not just Latin. Surely if we are to use a foreign word we should use its correct plural form in the original language, although very frequently used words tend to have acceptable Anglicised plurals, for example terminuses. Many people use the correct plural form at times as if it were singular, for instance they will say “the criteria for that IS…” I have even heard talk of “a crises”. My particular bete noire is the addition of the English plural S to words which are already plural, for instance many cafes advertise that they sell paninis. Many people talk of the Himalayas, when the singular is Himal. Even BBC presenters are not immune. And on an unrelated but similar topic, many words with classical origins are pronounced in a way which betrays ignorance of their origins, both here and in the US- for instance DI-SECTION and not DIS-SECTION. This both ignores the origin meaning cut apart and not cut in two (BI-SECTION) and the common English pronunciation rule whereby a vowel followed by a double consonant is pronounced short. Sorry for all this rant but I pose a question also here- how do we talk about place names which are plural? I cannot see any other way than saying for instance that Delphi IS a classical site, ignoring the fact that the place name is plural in the Greek and this is acknowledged in various inflections when talking about it in Greek. There are probably similar examples in all countries, for instance Les Baux in France. I think the native French grammar may cope with it in a different way but am not sure here.
Place name are almost always singular in English. A great many Latin place names are plural and take plural Latin verbs, but they should still have singular verbs in English.
And it’s such fun, too, when people try to shoehorn Latin plural forms onto Greek words. Take “octopus” for instance. The Greek plural is not “octopi”, but “octopodes”. But for those of us who prefer not to be pretentious, “octopuses” is the go-to plural.
In fact, probably the wisest way to pluralize Latin and Greek words that have found their way into our language, is to use the standard English plural form “-s”, particularly if the word has been an English word for a long time. Not “referenda”, but “referendums”; not “honoraria”, but “honorariums”.
There are exceptions, though. “Criterion” –> “criteria”; “stimulus’ –> “stimuli”; and of course “Kleenex” –> “Kleenices”.
@Doug Hicton:
“Take ‘octopus’ for instance.”
No, please, let’s not. For the simple fact that “octopus” is not Greek. It’s an 18th century coinage (by Carolus Linnaeus, from Greek roots, but analogized to the Latinized “polypus”). The animal we call an octopus the Greeks called a “polypous”. There was a Greek word “oktapous”, but it never referred to an eight-limbed sea dweller.
“The Greek plural is … ‘octopodes’”
Since “octopus” is not Greek, it can’t have a Greek plural. Stick with “octopuses”.