8 ms·
aside: me after reading the headline: Shouldn't that be Octopii? But no! "The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, no
by neerajk 2y ago
aside: me after reading the headline: Shouldn't that be Octopii?
But no!
"The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."
Thanks wikipedia.
TIL!
- fffrantz 2y agoThought exactly the same!
- crazygringo 2y agoI wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong? Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses". Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s. Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia? I genuinely don't know. All I know is that "octopuses" just sounds wrong for some reason I can't put my finger on. And that "octopii" somehow "feels" much better, even if everything about it is logically wrong. I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)
- danans 2y ago> I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong? Because of the english words with taboo meanings that coincidentally share the phonetic structure p-s-
- afiori 2y agoThe plural of fish is fish, but the plural of type of fish is fishes
- bmacho 2y ago> I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong? There are some Latin words ending -us in English, that keep their Latin plurals. For octopuses, both plurals are common and acceptable.
- FireBeyond 2y ago> I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".) There's a restaurant near here called Octapas.
- banannaise 2y agoBecause it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.
- alwa 2y agoI hadn’t thought about that, but that explanation suits me as to why “octopuses” comes off… I don’t know, muddy?… while the 1983 James Bond film named for the vulgar pun rolls off the tongue, even though they use virtually the same phonemes: it’s that the latter emphasizes the third syllable, making it metrical again. Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!
- foldr 2y agoIn that case I say we go with oc-TO-pusses (as in photograph vs. photography).
- crazygringo 2y agoBut "teleporters" or "marathoners" or tons of other words follow the same pattern of stress and sound fine. "Photocopiers" extends it to four unstressed syllables and sounds fine.
- banannaise 2y agoWe treat words like they have a single stressed syllable and everything else is unstressed, and that's a useful abstraction sometimes, but that's not actually true. "Photocopiers" has primary stress on the first syllable but secondary on the third - PHO-to-CO-pi-ers. The same goes for "teleporters" and "marathoners". But that also goes for "octopuses", so what gives? Seems like there's something else going on that my brain hasn't accounted for yet. It's probably that the plosives (stop consonants) are hugely unbalanced, with all of them coming in the first half of the word. Plosives, as the word implies, can add quite a bit of oomph to a word, even if they aren't reflected in the stress pattern. So "octopuses" seems to just peter out halfway through the word.
- StrictDabbler 2y agoThe pronunciation of the word is already on the boundaries between "awk-toe-poos", "awk-tuh-puhs", and "awk-tah-piss" depending on your region just in America. So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.
- gpderetta 2y agoIncidentally, if, as per etymology, we consider the tentacles as feet, then the headline is wrong as the Octopodes are technically kicking the fishes.
- declan_roberts 2y agoThis whole thing is built on lies!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- johnnyjeans 2y agoTechnically speaking, Octopuses don't have tentacles at all. Those are arms. The morphology of "Octopus" is actually a really great example case for demonstrating paraconsistent logic.
- Gravityloss 2y agoHmm so the name must be corrected to be 8-armed in Greek. Oktobratso? Oktooplizo? Oktocheiro?
- gpderetta 2y agoIt goes deeper than that! According to wikipedia, the tentacles, or appendages, are indeed called "arms", but they evolved from what in other molluscs is called a "foot"!
- cacois 2y agoIt's a house of cards, people!
- gpderetta 2y agoyes, something is ... afoot.
- kaiken1987 2y ago
- Aardwolf 2y agoSo the plural of virus, if it wouldn't have been viruses, would be viri, not virii? I think for octopus I'd have intuitively thought octopi, but for virus I'd have thought virii.
- nerdponx 2y agoIt is in fact "viri".
- jjk166 2y agoVirus actually is a latin word, but the plural is vira. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Latin
- Rebelgecko 2y agoThe plural of the Latin virus is vira (second declension etc etc). However viri means "men"
- kibwen 2y agoBut more generally, enough generations have passed that "octopus" is no longer a foreign word, it's now just part of the English lexicon, and so you're free to pluralize it in the standard English manner. "Octopuses" is correct by that reasoning. Note that this is the same process that we eventually apply to every other loanword; next time you talk to a German, watch them cringe at "delicatessens" as the plural to "delicatessen".
- carlmr 2y agoDelicatessen itself is a French loanword (délicatesse) in German that's wrongly pluralized, it should be délicatesses not delicatessen. So it's like doubly wrong.
- shmeeed 2y agoI'm waiting for myself to one day muster the courage to order "dos expressis" at a restaurant in Italy. But I fear the repercussions.
- 725686 2y agoTouché!
- mytailorisrich 2y agoBut according to Wikipedia, the French délicatesse is an Italian loanword (delicatezza)...
- cyberpunk 2y agoI’m sure I read a sci-fi novel some years back where one of the main characters selectively breeds octopuses for intelligence before dropping them on a terraformed planet and there was a small bit about how he didn’t like octopuses either and so called them octopii. I’m in his boat ;) fun book, forgot the name.
- dougfulop 2y agoChildren of Time!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yayitswei 2y agoCould it be "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky? (ht Claude)
- jayGlow 2y agoit sounds more like the sequel "children of ruin" children of time primarily involves spiders.
- diggan 2y ago> Could it be "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky? Currently reading that one and there is no octopuses (only read half so far though) but a lot of spiders, ants and space-faring primates :)
- globular-toast 2y agoRight. They are talking about the sequel, Children of Ruin.
- user982 2y agoChildren of Ruin.
- mellavora 2y ago
- mellavora 2y agoYes, but always remember the plural of applepus is apple pie
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sigzero 2y agoI am using octopodes from now on!
- banannaise 2y agoWhile I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong: 1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today. 2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization. 3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words! 3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense. 4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.
- iwontberude 2y ago3. “Octopuses” sounds like what a child or English as Second Language speaker would say. Not sure what is stilted about being a novice to the language.
- banannaise 2y agoAnd a child or ESL speaker will often use constructions that sound stilted. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. "Stilted" is a bit of a judgy word, but it's not a value judgment of anyone else's intelligence. Some English speech sounds stilted. So it goes. That's why I don't prefer that pluralization in my own speech. Lord knows I sound weird enough at times; I'm not here to throw stones from glass houses.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoI think what you cited missed the spelling aberration, since the -pus is a mistake, as it should have been -pous,-podes (singular,plural, nominative). the word is just a chimera. also, the reality is #define octopi octopodes #define octopuses octopodes and so on is what's more or less going on...whereas in English octopodes is a mouthful.
- not_kurt_godel 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluralisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluralis...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]