Grammar question

[cynara_linnaea]

If two times is twice and three times is thrice, what is four times?
Similarly, if two is duplicate and three is triplicate, four is quadruplicate?

P.S. If you are asking these question with regards to your database entries, you have problems.

Comments

[dr_whom]

Well, twice and thrice can be traced back uninterruptedly to Proto-Indo-European *dwisand *tris. The PIE word for 'four times' is reconstructed as *kwatrus, but it's hard to figure out what that would have become in English because the Germanic languages treat 'four' strangely: By regular sound change that ought to become *hwathruz in Proto-Germanic, which would probably become something like *whadder or *whather if it survived to modern English, but 'four' doesn't really undergo regular sound change in Germanic. The reason four has an F at all is because it borrowed the /f/ from 'five', for example. So maybe *kwatrus would have undergone the same analogy and become *fathruz in Germanic instead. This might come out as *fadder or *father (but possibly pronounced with /æ/, unlike the word father?). But something happened to drop the /d/ out of the middle of four (which should have become Germanic *hwedwor-), and whatever caused that might have affected *hwathruz as well.

No, no wonder English doesn't have this word. In Latin it's

[debka_notion]

Once, twice, thrice, four times. Sadly.

However, I'm pretty sure that if the bureaucracy gets any worse, we will indeed have to be filling out forms in quadruplicate. At least, somewhere I've heard that word used.

[cynara_linnaea]

savant1984 had to fill out his school applications in octuplicate. He was understandably irritated.

[beltonius]

I have filled things out in quadruplicate. Luckily the forms were carbon copies. And yes, I did that like, within the past 6 months. Yay 21st century technology!