9 ms·

No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)

by bananarchist 4y ago

mc32 4y ago
I always thought it was virus and virus given its root.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number. Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem. (Originally it would have been visos => visosa, but the final vowel in virus has become closed, while the intervocalic s has become r due to rhotacism.) You have been thinking at the masculine words whose stem ends in -u, like fructu (fruit), where the singular is fructus and the plural is fructuus. There -s is not part of the stem but it is a marker of the singular masculine nominative case. In virus and the other neuter nouns that end in -s, the -s is a part of the stem of the word, not a case marker. There are also masculine word where the stem ends in -s, like muus (mouse), in which the -s must also not be confused with the marker of the nominative case that is applied to some of the words with other kinds of stems.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    > the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri, not viroris.
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      It is true that there are a few cases of a word "viri", which might have been the genitive of "virus". Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen. Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain seldom used words. Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum"). Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension. Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.
      - DFHippie 4y ago
        That all makes sense. What I know of virus is all from books like Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, which is basically a 19th century understanding: languages have particular rules one can enumerate and deviations from these rules are errors.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        That understanding is basically correct. But the history of Latin is quite long, and the rules change over time.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
daveslash 4y ago
It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish. I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)
- colechristensen 4y ago
  There’s no right way. Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
  - cnelsenmilt 4y ago
    Personally I've always preferred to muddy the waters by treating it as a fourth-declension noun, so that its plural would be octopūs.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold. so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive! Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is) Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
DFHippie 4y ago
Virus is the only neuter second declension Latin noun in -us (as opposed to -um). It means "poison" in Latin. I assume this was all meant tongue-in-cheek, but in case anyone is curious, the Latin plural is not virodes. All of this is recalled from my high school Latin, which was a long time ago.
annyeonghada 4y ago
In latin the word virus does not have an attested plural[1] but if we model it from the other neuter nouns of the second declension it would be "vira". [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 The plural of surplus is surpluses[2]. It would be *surplures/surplura in latin, so it is an English/French original. It doesn't make sense from an historical linguistic perspective to have a stem in dental "d" when in latin was in liquid "r": plus, pluris[3]. [2]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun [3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension Cactus is a masculine name from the second declension: its latin plural is "cactī"[4]. Again, it would be unexplainable how that stem in dental would appear in a second declension name (stem in "o"). [4]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin Octopus is right, given that it's a third declension name with a dental stem.[5] [5]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin
- bananarchist 4y ago
  Your surplodes of evidence will never sway me and my linguistodes degree
  - euroderf 4y ago
    I tried to pursue this topic to the antipodes but I only found an antipus.
cph123 4y ago
I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  It’s 6th for me, and no adverts. How does this get monetised?
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Something something pr0n
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Paige, no!
- ant6n 4y ago
  7th result on the first page? Sounds like an authoritative source to me!
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Google it a few more times, google will start feeding it back to people who will also google it in disbelief; two years from now they're using it in NYT headlines.
- knaekhoved 4y ago
  Impressive indexing speed.
  - KMag 4y ago
    If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling. These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.
bmitc 4y ago
Either is fine. Octopuses or octopodes. The latter is the technical answer, but the former is acceptable and probably even more common. Although it is based on a Greek word, English isn’t Greek.
staplung 4y ago
The correct form is to sum up the legs involved. So two of the eight-legged creatures whose plural is in doubt would be hexadecapods. And if you have an octopus eating a kangaroo you'd then have a decapod, and so on.
lalos 4y ago
what is the plural for campus?
- tokai 4y ago
  >The Latinate plural form campi is sometimes used, particularly with respect to colleges or universities; however, it is sometimes frowned upon. By contrast, the common plural form campuses is universally accepted. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology
jl6 4y ago
abacus->abacodes nautilus->nautilodes anus->anodes ?!
barrenko 4y ago
Isn't it virii (joke)?
nerdponx 4y ago
Not so fast. "virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English. "surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". I admit that "superplodes" is pretty fun to say.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". What's irregular about that?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Well, nothing technically, from what Latin I remember. I meant it in the not-technical sense that the nominative form is different from the word stem and it looks superficially like a standard 1st/2nd declension adjective.
smeagull 4y ago
Actually we're speaking English, and not Greek or Latin, so we add an 's' or 'es'. Just because some English professor assholes wanted to show off their knowledge of foreign languages in the 17-19th centuries, doesn't mean we should follow those rules now. They are responsible for a lot of the confusion and horrible English rules that users of English now have to deal with. I say shit on their horrible legacy.

No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)

mc32 4y ago

I always thought it was virus and virus given its root.

adrian_b 4y ago
All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number. Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem. (Originally it would have been visos => visosa, but the final vowel in virus has become closed, while the intervocalic s has become r due to rhotacism.) You have been thinking at the masculine words whose stem ends in -u, like fructu (fruit), where the singular is fructus and the plural is fructuus. There -s is not part of the stem but it is a marker of the singular masculine nominative case. In virus and the other neuter nouns that end in -s, the -s is a part of the stem of the word, not a case marker. There are also masculine word where the stem ends in -s, like muus (mouse), in which the -s must also not be confused with the marker of the nominative case that is applied to some of the words with other kinds of stems.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  > the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri, not viroris.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    It is true that there are a few cases of a word "viri", which might have been the genitive of "virus". Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen. Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain seldom used words. Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum"). Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension. Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      That all makes sense. What I know of virus is all from books like Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, which is basically a 19th century understanding: languages have particular rules one can enumerate and deviations from these rules are errors.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        That understanding is basically correct. But the history of Latin is quite long, and the rules change over time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

daveslash 4y ago

It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish. I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)

colechristensen 4y ago
There’s no right way. Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
- cnelsenmilt 4y ago
  Personally I've always preferred to muddy the waters by treating it as a fourth-declension noun, so that its plural would be octopūs.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold. so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive! Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is) Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out

DFHippie 4y ago

Virus is the only neuter second declension Latin noun in -us (as opposed to -um). It means "poison" in Latin. I assume this was all meant tongue-in-cheek, but in case anyone is curious, the Latin plural is not virodes. All of this is recalled from my high school Latin, which was a long time ago.

annyeonghada 4y ago

In latin the word virus does not have an attested plural[1] but if we model it from the other neuter nouns of the second declension it would be "vira". [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 The plural of surplus is surpluses[2]. It would be *surplures/surplura in latin, so it is an English/French original. It doesn't make sense from an historical linguistic perspective to have a stem in dental "d" when in latin was in liquid "r": plus, pluris[3]. [2]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun [3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension Cactus is a masculine name from the second declension: its latin plural is "cactī"[4]. Again, it would be unexplainable how that stem in dental would appear in a second declension name (stem in "o"). [4]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin Octopus is right, given that it's a third declension name with a dental stem.[5] [5]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin

bananarchist 4y ago
Your surplodes of evidence will never sway me and my linguistodes degree
- euroderf 4y ago
  I tried to pursue this topic to the antipodes but I only found an antipus.

cph123 4y ago

I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.

lostlogin 4y ago
It’s 6th for me, and no adverts. How does this get monetised?
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Something something pr0n
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Paige, no!
ant6n 4y ago
7th result on the first page? Sounds like an authoritative source to me!
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Google it a few more times, google will start feeding it back to people who will also google it in disbelief; two years from now they're using it in NYT headlines.
knaekhoved 4y ago
Impressive indexing speed.
- KMag 4y ago
  If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling. These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.

bmitc 4y ago

Either is fine. Octopuses or octopodes. The latter is the technical answer, but the former is acceptable and probably even more common. Although it is based on a Greek word, English isn’t Greek.

staplung 4y ago

The correct form is to sum up the legs involved. So two of the eight-legged creatures whose plural is in doubt would be hexadecapods. And if you have an octopus eating a kangaroo you'd then have a decapod, and so on.

lalos 4y ago

what is the plural for campus?

tokai 4y ago
>The Latinate plural form campi is sometimes used, particularly with respect to colleges or universities; however, it is sometimes frowned upon. By contrast, the common plural form campuses is universally accepted. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology

jl6 4y ago

abacus->abacodes nautilus->nautilodes anus->anodes ?!

barrenko 4y ago

Isn't it virii (joke)?

nerdponx 4y ago

Not so fast. "virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English. "surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". I admit that "superplodes" is pretty fun to say.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". What's irregular about that?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Well, nothing technically, from what Latin I remember. I meant it in the not-technical sense that the nominative form is different from the word stem and it looks superficially like a standard 1st/2nd declension adjective.

smeagull 4y ago

Actually we're speaking English, and not Greek or Latin, so we add an 's' or 'es'. Just because some English professor assholes wanted to show off their knowledge of foreign languages in the 17-19th centuries, doesn't mean we should follow those rules now. They are responsible for a lot of the confusion and horrible English rules that users of English now have to deal with. I say shit on their horrible legacy.