Numen - Lexicon Latinum et Virus!
"Numen - Lexicon Latinum et Virus!"
"Numen - The Latin Lexicon and Virus"
Another interesting Latin dictionary online:
Numen - The Latin Lexicon
They have virus and its paradigm, including the plural:
http://latinlexicon.org/paradigms.php?lexicon_id=1017472
Nice!
Augh, I was just looking over my old Virus et Octopus Iterum! post and the irritating Wikipedia article to which my post was responding. Unsurprisingly, the article has not been changed significantly since I made my post. What really gets me is that the "We cannot know how Latin grammar would bring about a plural for virus" argument is based partly on red herrings and partly on the notion that the plural forms of Latin words derives from their nominative singular forms.
Really, as far as many people know, Latin plural forms are formed by:
But that is not how it works at all.
Plural forms of neuter words derive from their oblique stems.
Okay, I will concede that the begin-mangle-add method is the way that singular-to-plural inflection of nouns is presented in the Latin classroom (I know from experience), but Latin pedagogy takes shortcuts in order to make learning this stuff easier, and does not attempt to explain why we have such inflected forms.
The proponents of the "We cannot know how Latin grammar would bring about a plural for virus" argument obsess over the strangeness of the nominative singular form of virus when in fact the form that they are seeking -- the nominative plural -- is not based on the nominative singular in the first place. Why, then, should the strangeness of the nominative singular form matter?
We have enough evidence showing that virus declined in the second declension (see a good dictionary), but the proposed evidence of its declension in the fourth is based on an ambiguity, and we lack any evidence that it is an actual word of Latin's or Greek's third declensions, with a stem in -r/-s.
The second-declension forms of virus formed from the word's oblique stem that we do have (e.g. genitive singular viri, ablative singular viro) are all based on the notion that the word is being inflected as a neuter stem in the second declension. Not any one of these cases forms is dependent on the nominative singular form, and there is literally nothing hindering any of the other case forms deriving from the oblique stem, which includes including the nominative plural form, from doing the same. And the form of the nominative singular virus does not change that. This is why the formation rules gives us vira as the plural form of virus.
So, really, the "We cannot know how Latin grammar would bring about a plural for virus" proponents seem to be saying that non-oblique-derived forms of words cancel out rules that apply to oblique-derived forms of words (ergo, no vira)... except when they do not (ergo, viri is okay).
If one wants to say that we cannot be justified in saying that vira is the regular Latin plural form of virus, that person better have a good reason, and "But the second-declension virus does not look like bellum" is not a good reason.
"Numen - The Latin Lexicon and Virus"
Another interesting Latin dictionary online:
Numen - The Latin Lexicon
They have virus and its paradigm, including the plural:
http://latinlexicon.org/paradigms.php?lexicon_id=1017472
Nice!
Augh, I was just looking over my old Virus et Octopus Iterum! post and the irritating Wikipedia article to which my post was responding. Unsurprisingly, the article has not been changed significantly since I made my post. What really gets me is that the "We cannot know how Latin grammar would bring about a plural for virus" argument is based partly on red herrings and partly on the notion that the plural forms of Latin words derives from their nominative singular forms.
Really, as far as many people know, Latin plural forms are formed by:
- taking the nominative singular form of the word,
- mangling it a bit (i.e. drop or change some letters)
- adding on extra letters that can be found in perceived similar words.
But that is not how it works at all.
Plural forms of neuter words derive from their oblique stems.
Okay, I will concede that the begin-mangle-add method is the way that singular-to-plural inflection of nouns is presented in the Latin classroom (I know from experience), but Latin pedagogy takes shortcuts in order to make learning this stuff easier, and does not attempt to explain why we have such inflected forms.
The proponents of the "We cannot know how Latin grammar would bring about a plural for virus" argument obsess over the strangeness of the nominative singular form of virus when in fact the form that they are seeking -- the nominative plural -- is not based on the nominative singular in the first place. Why, then, should the strangeness of the nominative singular form matter?
We have enough evidence showing that virus declined in the second declension (see a good dictionary), but the proposed evidence of its declension in the fourth is based on an ambiguity, and we lack any evidence that it is an actual word of Latin's or Greek's third declensions, with a stem in -r/-s.
The second-declension forms of virus formed from the word's oblique stem that we do have (e.g. genitive singular viri, ablative singular viro) are all based on the notion that the word is being inflected as a neuter stem in the second declension. Not any one of these cases forms is dependent on the nominative singular form, and there is literally nothing hindering any of the other case forms deriving from the oblique stem, which includes including the nominative plural form, from doing the same. And the form of the nominative singular virus does not change that. This is why the formation rules gives us vira as the plural form of virus.
So, really, the "We cannot know how Latin grammar would bring about a plural for virus" proponents seem to be saying that non-oblique-derived forms of words cancel out rules that apply to oblique-derived forms of words (ergo, no vira)... except when they do not (ergo, viri is okay).
If one wants to say that we cannot be justified in saying that vira is the regular Latin plural form of virus, that person better have a good reason, and "But the second-declension virus does not look like bellum" is not a good reason.