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> Jesuses (Jesii?) Pet peeve, honed by endless discussions on Slashdot in the late 1990s: -ii is not a Latin plural marker. -i is a Latin plural marker which c

> Jesuses (Jesii?) Pet peeve, honed by endless discussions on Slashdot in the late 1990s: -ii is not a Latin plural marker. -i is a Latin plural marker which can correspond to a singular -us. Plurals can look like -ii, but only if the singular word ends in -ius. That's simply because you replace -us by -i, and if there was an i before the -us, then there will be an i before the -i. (Example: the gladiator's sword, gladius, becomes gladii. But one of those i-s is part of the stem already.) Neither Jesus nor virus end in -ius, so their plurals can definitely, certainly, 100% never be Jesii and virii. They also happen to be words that end in -us but belong to declensions that don't use -i for the plural at all. (So no Jesi and viri either. "Viri" is a Latin word but means something else.) And on top of that IIRC virus is uncountable in Latin and Jesus is irregular even for the declension it sort of belongs to, and are proper names even countable? Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
thank you for the informational pedantry :) So what would the plural of Jesus be? My name is Marcus, and I whenever I meet another Marcus, I wedge the "Marcii" joke in there somewhere. I would like to be able to refine this. What would two Marcuses (which sounds so wrong) be called?
- tom_mellior 5y ago
  Wiktionary says "Marci", or "Mārcī" to be pedantic (I'm not sure how strict this is; when I was learning Latin in high school we weren't taught to care much about diacritics on vowels), for Latin: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#Latin and doesn't give an English plural: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#English Note that Marcus is a second-declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_second_declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_second_declens...) noun, which is the class where a singular -us turns into plural -i (again, only a single one). But Jesus is fourth declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...), so if it has a plural, then in Latin it's something more like Jesūs (or, again, Jesus without the diacritic; I believe it only marks lengthening of the vowel, no change of the quality of the sound). But https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#Latin says that while it's fourth declension, it's also "highly irregular", and "singular only". It would seem plausible to me that the question never arose in Latin practice, because multiple people called Jesus could always be described as "multiple people called Jesus", and multiple instances of the Jesus would be an unspeakable heresy. As for English, well. Though I was pedantic above, I should also note that I know that language is what people make it. If the vast majority of English speakers decide that the plural of Jesus is "Jesuseseses", then that's what it is, in English. Even if "just" a certain community decides on a certain usage, then that usage is what the plural is -- at least in that community's variant of English. Having established that, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#English lists "Jesuses or Jesi" for the given name and "Jesuses or Jesusses or Jesi or Jesii" for the noun denoting the Christian savior. The variants with i-s hurt my eyes (pun not intended, but I'll take it), and as I explained above, have no roots in Latin (or the Ancient Greek that Latin got it from) but try to look Latin while showing deep misunderstandings of how Latin works, so I would advise against them -- they don't make you look smart or learned. "Marci" seems fine in this regard, but again "Marcii" is not. (Interestingly, a bunch of the Wiktionary quotations for "Jesi" are of the form "Jesuses (Jesi?)", i.e., cases where the author was questioning themselves on this point, which is kind of weak for a dictionary.) I would say that since -s is the dominant way of forming plurals in English, "Jesuses" and "Marcuses" are the most natural choices, inasmuch as forming plurals of given names can ever sound natural. But I'm not the English police (nor even a native speaker). Only the don't-randomly-double-i-because-you-think-that's-Latin police :-)

marcus_holmes 5y ago

thank you for the informational pedantry :) So what would the plural of Jesus be? My name is Marcus, and I whenever I meet another Marcus, I wedge the "Marcii" joke in there somewhere. I would like to be able to refine this. What would two Marcuses (which sounds so wrong) be called?

tom_mellior 5y ago
Wiktionary says "Marci", or "Mārcī" to be pedantic (I'm not sure how strict this is; when I was learning Latin in high school we weren't taught to care much about diacritics on vowels), for Latin: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#Latin and doesn't give an English plural: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#English Note that Marcus is a second-declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_second_declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_second_declens...) noun, which is the class where a singular -us turns into plural -i (again, only a single one). But Jesus is fourth declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...), so if it has a plural, then in Latin it's something more like Jesūs (or, again, Jesus without the diacritic; I believe it only marks lengthening of the vowel, no change of the quality of the sound). But https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#Latin says that while it's fourth declension, it's also "highly irregular", and "singular only". It would seem plausible to me that the question never arose in Latin practice, because multiple people called Jesus could always be described as "multiple people called Jesus", and multiple instances of the Jesus would be an unspeakable heresy. As for English, well. Though I was pedantic above, I should also note that I know that language is what people make it. If the vast majority of English speakers decide that the plural of Jesus is "Jesuseseses", then that's what it is, in English. Even if "just" a certain community decides on a certain usage, then that usage is what the plural is -- at least in that community's variant of English. Having established that, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#English lists "Jesuses or Jesi" for the given name and "Jesuses or Jesusses or Jesi or Jesii" for the noun denoting the Christian savior. The variants with i-s hurt my eyes (pun not intended, but I'll take it), and as I explained above, have no roots in Latin (or the Ancient Greek that Latin got it from) but try to look Latin while showing deep misunderstandings of how Latin works, so I would advise against them -- they don't make you look smart or learned. "Marci" seems fine in this regard, but again "Marcii" is not. (Interestingly, a bunch of the Wiktionary quotations for "Jesi" are of the form "Jesuses (Jesi?)", i.e., cases where the author was questioning themselves on this point, which is kind of weak for a dictionary.) I would say that since -s is the dominant way of forming plurals in English, "Jesuses" and "Marcuses" are the most natural choices, inasmuch as forming plurals of given names can ever sound natural. But I'm not the English police (nor even a native speaker). Only the don't-randomly-double-i-because-you-think-that's-Latin police :-)