"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".
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.
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.
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.
Can you give an example of "arcane black magic heuristics"? I cannot imagine, what weird rules you could even come up with, aside from the normal "sensible" ones you already listed.
I was on a different team, but my third-hand knowledge from 20 years ago (notably, before deep learning became mainstream, even at Google) was that Google crawl scheduling had a bunch of heuristics to guess at the update frequency of a given page. The probability that a page has changed since you last crawled it is an important factor in the expected utility of crawling it now.
As I mentioned, I expect that even more arcane heuristics, in the form of ML models, has largely or completely replaced the hand-written heuristics.
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".
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].
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").
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. :)
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.
> 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.
I recall reading that back in the day, there were criticisms that the neologism "television" would never catch on ... because it combined Greek and Latin roots.
Is it true the majority of imperial Rome personal names had -anus endings and they are not in vogue in Modern English for the obvious soundalike to Uranus?
And given the time available to an octopus while she waits for her eggs to hatch, what is the recommended reading list from the Loeb library for the octopus's consciousness if there were a universal translator babelfish she could use?
There may be no universally agreed right way, but there are certainly wrong ways. "Octopuses" and "octopodes" are both acceptable, but "octopi" is wrong. "Octopuses" can be justified using Fowler's rule (from 1913!) "there is a tendency to abandon the Latin plurals, & that when one is really in doubt which to use the English form should be given the preference". "Octopodes" can be justified on etymological grounds. There is no basis to use "octopi" other than an erroneous application of the Latin rule to form plurals for second declension nouns.
There's a wrong way, though - anybody smugly telling somebody they're an idiot for saying 'octopuses' when it's actually 'octopi'.
I think 'octopodes' is 'most correct', but 'octopuses' is fine. And most will mispronounce 'octopodes' if they choose it anyway, so 'octopuses' probably would've been better.
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
octopi arises because people have learned Latin 2nd declension masculine nouns, by accident or repetition, where pluralizing (nominative case) turns the -us to -i.
It's a pattern matching phenomenon.
It would be less weird if there were not spelling irregularities, since the -pus is meant to be foot (like pes, pedes...in Latin, or pos, podes,... in Greek).
Basically, the spelling irregularity triggers a sensible pattern match, which happens to of course not honor the spelling irregularity.
And then nerds like me write too much about such, but i had years of Latin (and a little Greek) for something!
Maddeningly, it doesn't even apply to all Latin -us nouns. For instance, the plural of apparatus should be apparatūs if we're applying the Latin rules. Apparati, as it might seem, makes no sense! So even when the pattern match correctly identifies the language, it can be misleading.
apparatus is a past participle from apparare, so as an adjective plural would follow second declension, not fourth, i thought.
used as a noun, it's an (implicit thing) prepared (which preparatus would describe, but i guess we don't have any other word in English other than apparatus.
apparatus is first/second as a past participle. I suppose it could be used as a substantive, but there is also a fourth declension noun with the same lemma meaning implements, tools, etc.: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/apparatus
Ironically, when not used as a word ending, but as a single word... "I" is a singular way to talk about a person (namely, oneself), where as "us" is a plural way to talk about multiple people.
one that I often hear foreign speakers struggling with is “hair”. 1 hair, 2 hairs, a whole head of hair. seemingly, if it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form. but then it could be absolutely correct to say “the many hairs on my head”, an uncountable which retains the plural.
Japanese is worse. You count "1 thing", "2 thing", "3 thing", except the word for "thing" changes depending on the shape of the thing you are counting.
So thin flat things like paper or shirts are 1 mai, 2 mai, 3 mai, while to count books you say 1 satsu, 2 satsu, 3 satsu.
Long round things like pencils or umbrellas go 1 pon, 2 hon, 3 bon, 4 hon, 5 hon, 6 pon, etc (yeah you read that right).
There are different counter words for different kinds of animals, small things, vehicles, shoes, drinks, people, etc.
That's just consonant mutation[0][1], like how english speakers say "a pencil" but "an umbrella"[2]. (Ie, "hon", "pon", and "bon" are all the same word, just pronounced differently due to environment.) The fact that ほ ぼ ぽ (ho bo po) are all the same underlying letter, just with different diacritics, kind of hints at this.
> it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form.
You'd have a hard time counting all the stars, but "sky of star" doesn't work like "head of hair" does. I love how expressive English is, but it's got issues for sure.
All languages are a mess. Imagine instead of specific noun rules, every single noun had a rule by way of a gender. And to conjugate “boat” or “table” you need to know its arbitrary gender.
English, unlike a lot of the big European languages, doesn’t have a central controlling body and hasn’t gone through powerful standardisation efforts - beyond dictionaries (i.e. consistent spelling and meaning). many (most?) European languages follow pretty consistent conjugation and pronunciation rules. yeah there are a few exceptions in each case, but nowhere near the scale of English.
grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves
> grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves
That's a really good point actually, one I've not heard before.
I think it's still harder learning from an ungendered language, since you naturally think of mapping word:word, but you also need word:gender now. With your point though, maybe I can have an easier time of it by trying to consciously think of it instead as word:(word, gender), if that makes sense.
Mass noun is the term for that. Octopus is generally only a mass noun if talking about their meat.
As far as the plural goes, it is just a weird corner of the language where there is no consensus on what the right word is. merriam-webster lists all three variants as plurals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
