--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, billy jim <emptybill@> wrote: > <snip> > > The Houri-s sound so much better. > > OK, I can't stand it any longer. > > With plural nouns, why do you put a hyphen between the > word and the "s"? >
I'm not at all sure, but in my understanding he does it if he thinks a word is not a genuine loan word from another language into English, but a word of another language used amongst English text. For instance, if you consider the word 'siddhi' a loan word from Sanskrit to English, it's OK to write the plural as 'siddhis', but the Sanskrit (nominative) plural would actually be the rather awkward 'siddhayaH' as in te samaadhaav upasargaa(,) vyutthaane siddhayaH. But if you don't think it's a loan word (yet), it seems to me quite cool to write the plural like 'siddhi-s'. That's probably not a convention accepted by native English grammarians, though. For instance the Finnish word 'sauna' is, AFAIK, nowadays a genuine English word borrowed from Finnish, so it's OK to write the plural like 'saunas', but the Finnish (nominative) plural would be 'saunat'.
