On Mar 24, 2011, at 7:44 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
Regularization of foreign loan-words happens over time regardless of lexical category. Irregular forms have to be in frequent use and/ or have to signify status within a lexical community in order to be preserved -- which is why, for instance, "alumni" and "syllabi" are still in circulation, but virtually no one refers to more than one sports stadium as "stadia."
Actually, quite a few baseball geeks like to use "stadia". I also see "premia" sometimes. These are reinvented forms with no consistent history in the language, and in my mind they are -- as you said in another post about "celli" -- insufferably pretentious.
Which loan words keep their foreign plurals is not just random. There's a solid logic to it, primarily related to whether the word is loaned along with its plural and remains a noun, or whether it comes only as a singular and has some sort of transformation of meaning.
Alumnus and syllabus mean in English roughly the same as what they meant in Latin. Stadium does not. And indeed when stadium is used in its original sense (a unit of distance) the preferred plural is indeed stadia.
It also matters a lot when the word was loaned and whether it was primarily used in science or if it spread to general usage. Several words take a different plural for different meanings, and invariably it is the more technical meaning that keeps the foreign plural (eg, indexes/indices, focuses/foci, etc).
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