plurals of foreign words
- From: goodbyekitty2005@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 19 Oct 2005 03:36:23 -0700
I had a *huge* debate with one of my friends about this last night so
just thought I'd canvas some opinion.
We were discussing whether foreign words in English should take the
English plural (so basically add an "s") or keep their original plural
form. IIRC the initial discussion was about "stadium" - should it be
"stadium" or "stadia"? And if it's "stadia", then what about words
where it's more complicated - probably ones of Greek origin, like
phenomenon/phenomena etc. (Don't even get me started on datum/data!)
Then we went on to things like "spaghetti", which going by the ending
is a plural. My friend claims there isn't a singular of it in Italian.
(Then what do they call a single strand of spaghetti?) Would you use
spaghetti as a plural?
(Then he got really into the discussion and started wondering whether
we should use the foreign genitive too - not "the stadium's entrance"
but "stadii entrance". Or even worse, in the plural: "stadiorum
entrance".)
What do you guys say? Stadiums? Commas? (Commas is Standard English but
in German you can say either Kommas or Kommata.) Criterions? (I hope
not.) Any other comments?
Kat
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: plurals of foreign words
- From: Adrian Bailey
- Re: plurals of foreign words
- From: Prai Jei
- Re: plurals of foreign words
- From: Donna Richoux
- Re: plurals of foreign words
- Prev by Date: This is bad!
- Next by Date: Re: This is bad!
- Previous by thread: This is bad!
- Next by thread: Re: plurals of foreign words
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading