Sigh... ah, self-appointed guardians of lingual correctitude.
The English "virus" definitely came from Latin. See for yourself at www.m-w.com (Merriam Webster), dictionary.com, etc., etc.. Their listed original meaning, and that in my old Latin textbooks (looked it up over lunch) is "venom" or "poison," or a slimy substance that contains venom or poison (killer snot?), plus a few other related ancient meanings. Makes sense if you think about the way people used to understand diseases. Same story on cactus (Latin-derived), but that in itself was derived for the older Greek "kaktos." "Virus" is similarly derived in Latin from older languages still, in this case, Greek and Sanskrit - a combinaton word, similar to the way Germans build new words.
Rules of pluralization depend on who taught you English, on whether it is American or Queen's English, and *when* you learned the language, as the rules are not set "in stone" in some international standards organization but are all by common agreement only (textbook publishers are king here), and *have changed over time*. In my own lifetime I've seen a major change in the way "standard English" deals with paragraph formatting, thanks to the rise of email. 20 years ago, one wouldn't dream of starting a paragraph without an intendation. Now email-style formatting appears in school textbooks as a viable option for all written English.
What I think would be fascinating trivia on this subject would be to go back to, say, Chaucer or his contemporaries to see if he/they used these Latin-derived words in plural at all, and if so, how. Then go back further, to a variant of English closer to regular German (it is Angle-ish after all), e.g. Beowulf-era stuff, see how Latin-derived words were used in those days, if at all.
Honestly folks - statements about what is absolutely correct in a given language are silly on their face, especially for English. The English language in itself is a hodge-podge mostly of corrupted German and Latin, plus later derivatives of those major "root" languages (French, Spanish, Danish, etc), which themselves are corruptions of older languages still. English is picking up new words every single day, and changing the definitions of old words to suit new needs as well. To follow the "aboslutely right" line of thinking, we should all use "Der/Das/Die" instead of "the," "das Hund" instead of "the hound," "der Durchfahre" instead of "the thoroughfare", and so on. They still do such things in parts of Scotland, where the English language has evolved the least and is sometimes practically German (for simple lack of large-scale cultural interaction, unlike the US, which is non-stop interaction). Were it not for such cultural interaction and its influence on languages, we wouldn't even *have* the word "virus" in the English language, must less be able to argue about its origin or pluralization rules. We certainly wouldn't use a word from another language originally referring to venom to describe a self-propagating computer program of malicious intent, if we follow the "purist" model.
Languages evolve over time, for the simple reason that, I think, as George Carlin put it best - words only have what meaning we all agree they have (in the "There are no 'bad words'" sketch). They're just sounds or symbols, after all, with no meaning in and of themselves. If they had inherent meaning, there would be only 1 language. As opinions on things change, so do the words we use and how we use them. Imagine if the dictionary never had a new word added or a word changed, or if we still used the grammar and spelling of Middle English. There is no right answer, save this: if you can communicate the *idea* to the other person, the language worked. Language is a tool only. Tools constantly get revised: What's the current version of GCC? Of QT, Tk, PHP, Perl, etc? English is no different.
Now, if there were such an organization like the IEEE or W3C or such for each major language with an enforcement capability on textbook & dictionary publishers & the like, the story might be different. Until then... The cacti are full of viri AND the cactuses are full of viruses. :) Embrace the chaos & use it to your advantage, for trying to fight it is pointless.
Now let's get off this OT garbage and back on to Fedora stuff, eh? (this oughta piss off the purists:) Ich habe viele serveren fixus.
JK
Taylor, ForrestX wrote:
On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 10:33, Steven W. Orr wrote:
On Wednesday, Aug 18th 2004 at 10:04 -0700, quoth Taylor, ForrestX:
=>On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 13:52, Andrew Dietz wrote:
=>> Ok, here's my biggest pet peeve:
=>> =>> The plural of CACTUS is CACTUSES, not CACTI, and the plural of
=>> VIRUS is VIRUSES, not VIRII.
=>
=>My pet peeve is the improper spelling of Latin plurals ;o)
=>
=>The Latin plural of VIRUS would be VIRI if it had one, certainly not
=>VIRII. Virus never had a plural in Latin because it a mass noun, not a
=>count noun.
=>
=>cacti is an acceptable form of plural for cactus (in Latin and English).
Wrong! The plural of virus is viruses. The word virus can be used as either a mass noun as in "He has a rhyno-virus." which would imply that he has a large number of individual virus particles infesting his body. The alternate is that it is used to refer to individual virus particles at the 20-30nm scale. Since the word is not derived from Latin, there is no possibility of the word ending in the second declension nominative plural "i" suffix to denote plural. The English plural ends in "es" for that reason.
Which part of my statement was wrong?
Actually, I believe that the English word virus did come from Latin. Virus was a dangerous or disgusting substance.
Forrest
