--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, cardemaister <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> > 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.
Aha! I'm sure you're right. 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. In typeset material, such a word would be set in italics, but the "s" would be set in roman. If all you've got is roman characters, though, I suppose the hyphen is a reasonable way to indicate the "s" isn't the foreign plural form. However, in an informal context such as this, I'm not sure it's really justified; it makes the material harder to read, and there's no important purpose served by it. > > 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'. >
