Word Stories: Latin plurals

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

The grammar of Latin still casts a long shadow over the English language. There are a number of nouns in modern English that are still in the same form as they were in Latin, and that raises a question that can have even the most educated amongst us scuttling for their dictionaries. How do we form the plural? Viruses or viri? Octopuses or octopi? Museums or musea?

The answer you choose may depend on whether you think that Latin should strictly be followed as a model or whether you think that English should be allowed to go its own sweet way. In fact, either stance is pretty difficult to maintain absolutely. Perhaps the main pitfall to be avoided is that of trying to make yourself sound educated by using a so-called Latin plural and in the process showing that you know nothing about Latin. For example, which of the three Latin plurals above (viri, octopi and musea) would you be happy to use? The answer is that musea is the only one with Latin justification – and the OED has an example from 1816 of its use in English, although the usual plural is, of course, museums. Virus had no plural in Latin and octopus came into Latin from Greek; the Latin plural was octopodes.

Many Latin plurals have firmly established themselves in English and leave us no alternative: bases and series, for example. Others seem pretty secure in one context, but perhaps not in another. We’re all happy talking about the electronic media, plural of medium, but what about people who claim to be able to contact the dead? Are they media? Or are they (as I would tend to call them) mediums? And there are some Latin plurals that we’ve all been quite happy to get rid of. Have you ever been invited to flick through somebody’s photograph alba?

The world of education has one or two words that might create potential problems: syllabus, curriculum, prospectus and corpus. How would you form the plurals of these words? If we take the OED as our authority, then you’d be on firm ground if you used syllabi or syllabuses, curricula, prospectuses and corpora.

If there are any aspects of English words you've always wondered about, drop me a line at [email protected] and I'll see if I can come up with an answer.