Stan
Bob Walkden wrote:
Hi,
Wednesday, October 29, 2003, 10:01:35 AM, you wrote:
Going OT here, but always wanted to be sure what the plural of ibis was.
I've heard ibises, ibes, ibii, ibex or just plain ibis etc.. As such I've
resorted to an-apple-two-apples, an-ibis-two-birds..
the New Oxford dictionary gives you a choice of one: ibises.
Ibex is a different animal altogether - a goat, not a bird. The English plural is 'ibexes'.
You can often treat words denoting animals as mass nouns, particular when you're eating the animals in question. For instance, you could serve ibex or ibis to 100 or so of your closest friends. If the proportions were not miserly this would constitute more than one ibex or ibis.
The other possibilities you list - ibes, ibii - are just confusion. My guess is that in normal speech most people would say 'ibises'. However, if they're writing, or being particularly aware of what they say, they may make an effort to be 'correct' or to sound educated. This leads people to make gross mistakes such as 'ibii', 'stati', 'statii' (or recently 'virii'). Relatively few people know Latin, but are familiar with words like radius/radii, focus/foci from school mathematics, they use analogy to try and form the plural of similar words, but often succeed only in failing. This is a hangover from 16th century England when the use of Latin loan-words was taken to be a sign of social superiority, and there was a lot of ostentatious use of such words, called 'inkhorn terms' because of the association of education and inkhorns (ink wells).
In Latin nouns are classified into 5 declensions, and some of the declensions are further sub-divided into groups. These declensions and groups reflect the different forms the words take according to their function in a clause. In particular, the plural forms are different in these declensions. Typically you can recognise the declension of a noun from the way the nominative singular ends. So normally a word ending in -a is 1st declension (plural -ae), -us is 2nd declension (plural -i). The most common 3rd declension ending is -is, plural -es, but the 3rd declension has several sub-categories.
Confusingly for generations of schoolboys, the nominative singular in the 4th decelension is -us, like the 2nd declension, but the nominative plural is also -us, but with a long 'u'.
Virus, focus and radius are 2nd declension, so the Latin nominative plurals are viri (NOT 'virii'), foci (NOT 'focii') and radii (yes!) respectively.
But status is 4th declension, so the Latin nominative plural is also status - NOT 'stati' or 'statii'.
Ibis is 3rd declension, group I, feminine. The nominative plural is ibes.
Ibex and index are (I think) 3rd declension group II, so the nominative plurals are respectively ibices and indices.
These are all common loan words in English. But remember, we're speaking English, not Latin. We don't have to conform to Latin grammar, and indeed in most cases (pun intended) we don't. Latin nouns have case endings. So if we wanted to talk about something belonging to several ibises, say their wings, we would say 'alae ibium', 'ibium' being the genitive plural. We never find that the people who insist on the 'correct plural' also insist on this equally 'correct' plural. That's because we speak English, not Latin.
English is very simple in its construction of plurals - add 's' or 'es' to the end of the word, with a small number of exceptions.
English has a long tradition of loan words from other languages, yet it seems to be only in the Latin and Greek ones - the prestige languages of centuries past - that some people expect us to conform to their grammar. I hope the absurdity of this is obvious. Why don't these people also insist on all the correct case endings, why is it just the nominative and the plural? Why not the ablative singular, or the vocative? Why don't they insist on agreement between adjesctives and nouns? Why don't they insist on the correct forms for other languages we've plundered, such as Norse, Australian, Algonquin, Basque, Spanish, Inuit and so on?
So, bearing in mind that we speak English, let's use the English plural forms for these inkhorn terms:
virus - viruses status - statuses focus - focuses ibis - ibises ibex - ibexes virus - viruses index - indexes (I might forgive indices in technical documents) radius - radiuses (I might forgive radii in mathematics) Twix - Twixes
People who say things like 'virii', 'statii' etc. are trying to second-guess Latin grammar without knowing what they're doing. It doesn't make them look educated. Far from it. Better to stick with the known quantity of English plurals.
