OT--Re: Help me find 5 mistakes and than solution to thoes mistakes!

[John Krische]

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
> 
>