Irregular plural nouns - foreign plurals발음듣기
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Irregular plural nouns - foreign plurals
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[Voiceover] Hello grammarians! Today we're talking about another kind of irregular plural noun, and that is the foreign plural.발음듣기
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And these words come from Latin and Greek, respectively, but don't get the idea that you need to learn to be able to speak Latin or Greek in order to speak English.발음듣기
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But while some words that got borrowed into English have lost their language-specific plurals, some have not.발음듣기
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So, for example, in an informal context, it would be perfectly acceptable for you or me to say funguses, like that.발음듣기
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But if I was talking to a biologist, she would probably say fungi if she were talking about them in a scientific context.발음듣기
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Now, my feeling is, that as fungus and cactus get more and more entrenched into English eventually these formal endings are going to fall away and we're just gonna have this regular plural.발음듣기
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But for now there are still some pluralizing rules for other languages that it helps to know.발음듣기
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So I made this little chart to go over the six most common Latin and Greek irregular plurals that you're going to encounter in English.발음듣기
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So you take a word like larva in the singular, which is like a little baby bug, like an ant larva, or a caterpillar larva, and the traditional irregular plural, the Latin plural of that, is larvae, -ae.발음듣기
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Secondly the ending change from final -us to final -i, which we find in a word like fungus, is the singular, and then the irregular plural of that is fungi.발음듣기
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And, as I said before, there are some people who use funguses, but again, that regular plural is more informal.발음듣기
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So we take a word like datum, which is a single unit of data, so the plural of data, so we change singular datum to plural data and there is no accepted, you wouldn't say the datas, that is not an accepted regular plural.발음듣기
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So if you take a word like index, or matrix, the plural of that is not indexes, but indices.발음듣기
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Indexes is, again, the informal regular plural, but indices is the more formal irregular plural.발음듣기
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This one is Greek and it's the change from final -is to final -es, as in the word thesis in the singular becoming theses in the irregular plural.발음듣기
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The regular plural of this I do not care for because it is thesises, and I think that sounds silly.발음듣기
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But thinking something is silly is no reason to stand athwart the tide of linguistic change, grumble grumble.발음듣기
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So we this word like criterion, or phenomenon, and in the plural it is criteria or phenomena.발음듣기
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Anyway, so these are six little ending rules, but, like I said, you don't need to learn Latin or Greek in order to make sense of English.발음듣기
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But having these six rules in your tool belt, if you use them judiciously, will probably come in handy.발음듣기
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But, for real, if you see a word and you don't know it's derivation, just trust your instincts and give it a regular plural.발음듣기
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