Per Jessen wrote:
Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 08:41:42AM +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
Fora and vira should both be the proper plural terms (for forums and
viruses respectively), but don't seem to have found much use in
English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
If you're trying to say that vira and fora should not be used, I beg to
differ. Vira, the correct latin plural of virus, is already used in a
number of languages, although not English. Same goes for Fora, the
latin plural of forum.
"Fora" is etymologically accurate, although in English it is no more
correct than "forums". "Vira", "virii" etc are all completely
fictitious, and have no basis in Latin. Although "virus" is a Latin
word, no plural form is recorded. I don't know any Latin noun which is
-us in the singular and -a in the plural, so even if we were to guess
what the plural might have been, "vira" would be a pretty poor guess.
How did we get on to this?
Soo Reams
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