QOTD

[redbird]

(Comments are closed, because if you imagine I am going to risk the violence of a discussion involving plural inflection, linguistic variation, the Wall Street Journal, corpus linguistics, Latin, Eton, snobbery, soccer, Davids Beckham and Cameron, Prince William, FIFA, corruption, bribery, the BBC, Vladimir Putin, Wikileaks, the Russian mafia, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin, you must be absolutely out of your tiny mind. I will be spending the weekend hunkered down in hiding with Julian Assange at a secret location outside London, avoiding the many forces around the world who would like to hunt down Language Log writers and kill them for daring to speak out on irregular plurals and other morphological and syntactic controversies.) —Geoffrey K. Pullum, at Language Log

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Hee!

(I sometimes say stadia, but I draw my line at octopodes.)

Haven't read the linked article yet -- about to

[eftychia]

Not saying "stadia" feels really strange in my mouth, though I can say "aquariums" more easily than "stadiums". As for "octopodes", that still feels/sounds odd but my relief from years ago at having finally found a plural that didn't sound wrong has not yet worn off, and (so far) trumps (for me) the oddness of the "-podes" ending. (Curiously, "clitorides" doesn't seem anywhere near as strange as "octopodes". Even more curiously, the "-im" plurals feel more natural to me where they appear in English than the 3rd-declension Greek plurals do, even though I studied Greek in middle-school and have never studied Hebrew.)

But it's going to be a real shame ifwhen popular usage turns "kudos" into the plural of "kudo" instead of (as it correctly is now) the singular of "kudoi". We get so few Greek 2nd-declension masculine nouns in English (but plenty of 2nd-declension neuter, such as "phenomenon"/"phenomena") that it'd be a shame to waste one.

I'm still trying to work out why interrobang's use of "Pentaces" as the plural of "Pentax" sounds reasonable even though (in hackish anyhow) the plural of "VAX" is "VAXen", not "Vaces" and when we're being deliberately cutesy in hackish, the plural of "box" is "boxen". Yeah, I do use the "-ices" plurals of "index" and "appendix", but I use "tax"/"taxes", "sax"/"saxophones", and rarely need to pluralize "syntax" ... though now that I'm thinking about it more, "thoraces" does sound like a natural plural of "thorax". Is it that the Greek "pent-" prefix is enough to mark "Pentax" as decidedly un-Anglo-Saxon in my subconscious?

OT1H, irregular plurals have to be one of the more frustrating things about ESL ... OTOH, as a native speaker, I find the diversity of plural forms part of English's charm.

[redbird]

I will say "octopodes," but that's partly because "octopi" is just wrong. "Stadia" or "stadiums" is okay with me (the words, that is: I am not thrilled with much recent tax-funded stadium building).

[randomness]

I think he should have left comments open. :)

As it was someone commented in the next post, which wasn't even his.