[And, of course, "cellos" and "concertos," etc.]
Like all things in language, it's entirely a matter of convention at what point the regular plural becomes "correct" and the irregular, foreign-language derived plural is dropped. But in this case, English language convention is pretty firmly in favor of "commas" as the plural of "comma." "Commata" is just ridiculous.
- Darcy
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn NY
On 05 Mar 2004, at 06:31 PM, Mark D Lew wrote:
On Mar 5, 2004, at 1:29 AM, Mario Aschauer wrote:
Carus puts the commata etc. right next to the syllable it belongs before
the word extension. That will look okay, too, I think.
Wow. I've seen "stigmata", "dogmata", "lemmata", and even "melismata", but "commata" is new to me. I can see the logic, since "comma" does indeed derive from Greek, but to a native Anglophone it looks very odd. Are there dictionaries where they teach the "-mata" plural for any Greek-derived "-ma" word?
mdl
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