On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 10:12:02AM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > At 09:25 AM 4/29/2006, Jim Stapleton wrote: > >Virii would be the correct spelling we biologists use, but viruses > >is standard in normal-people-speak, and gets the meaing across. > > Actually I was reading up on correct vs. common plurals after a > little debate around the office. It would appear the 'ii plural or > virus is NOT correct. See: > > http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html > http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g63.html
I think virus is a second declension masculine noun, so its nominative plural would be 'viri', but a plural form is not known from the extant cannon of Classical Latin. A complication would be that 'viri' is already known as the nominative plural of 'vir' (man), also of the second declension (I believe - my Latin was never up to much anyway, and what with no Cardinals or Popes to practise conversational Latin, I have forgotten most of it!). Which is why the other form 'virii' is occasionally seen, but again without precedent from Classical Latin, and with no attestation in any dictionary. This article at Wikipedia is pretty informative, if you like that kind of thing! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus Dan -- Daniel Bye PGP Key: ftp://ftp.slightlystrange.org/pgpkey/dan.asc PGP Key fingerprint: D349 B109 0EB8 2554 4D75 B79A 8B17 F97C 1622 166A _ ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) - against HTML, vCards and X - proprietary attachments in e-mail / \
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