![]() ![]() The pluralization of the word rhinoceros can create confusion too. To make matters worse, modern African rhinos (a 19th-century shortening) are classified in English as either black or white, despite the fact that they are all grey. The 1398 English edition of Bartholomeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum accordingly calls the exotic beast “Rinocero the Unicorne.” This traditional association helps explain the rather odd biblical claim that God is as strong as a unicorn (Numbers 23:22, King James Version). When the rhinoceros was introduced to curious Europeans, it was often described as a one-horned wonder-literally, a unicorn (Latin ūnicornis). All variants of the word, however, display their Greek origins proudly and highlight the animal’s distinguishing trait by evoking a horn (- keras) on a nose ( rhino-). This tangled family tree resulted in a great number of attested English variants: rinoceron, rhinocerot, rhinocerontes, rinocere, rhinoceros, etc. The English word rhinoceros testifies to a complex web of influences, including the following: the ancient Greek rhinokerōs/ rhinokerōtos the Imperial Latin rhīnocerōs/ rhīnocerōtis and rhīnocerōn/ rhīnocerōntis) and the Anglo-French and Middle French variants rinoceros, rynoceron, and rhinoceros. ![]() It’s not a flock of octopi, or a pod of octopodes. So if you’re ever lucky enough to witness a rare gathering of these fascinating sea dwellers, make sure to use the correct technical term. Clearly, there’s something about the octopus that attracts the sticklers. These days, the plural form octopuses has taken the lead, although octopi survives in casual contexts and octopodes still appears in formal contexts. In this condition of affairs, we are glad to know that a few resolute people have begun to talk about Octopods” - The Bradford Observer, 1873 “Some daring spirits with little Latin and less Greek, rushed upon octopi as for octopuses, a man would as soon think of swallowing one of the animals thus described as pronounce such a word at a respectable tea-table. The plural form octopuses (or octopusses) is also widespread ( Macon Telegraph, 1880), despite the fact that some observers have found it unrefined, and promoted octopodes (or octopods), based on the original Greek plural oktōpodes: A third-declension Latin term like octopus would, however, call for an entirely different kind of pluralization (like the change from corpus to corpora). The form octopi (or octopii) is well attested ( Penny Magazine for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1834), but it represents what sociolinguists call “hypercorrection”: Octopi is an attempt to apply grammatical rules where they don’t belong-based, in this case, on the mistaken assumption that octopus is a second-declension Latin word like fungus, in need of a plural form like fungi. Over time though, the less specific term polypus became associated more exclusively with the tentacled sea creatures still called polyps today.Īlthough the octopus is a relatively solitary creature, the question of how to pluralize its name eventually arose, spreading its own little flood of confusing ink. For a while, the word was treated as synonymous with polypus (“many-footed”), and the two words first appear in print together ( Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1759). Octopus came into English with the help of the scientific Latin name octopus, derived from the Byzantine Greek name for the animal ( oktōpous) and thereby the ancient Greek adjective oktōpous (“eight-footed”). It seems appropriate, then, that the word octopus is itself a confusing and shape-shifting thing. It can also change shape and even colour dramatically. It can evade predators by emitting clouds of ink. The octopus is a slippery animal, in every sense of the word. This Word Stories instalment looks at what can happen when this profusion of Greek and Latin roots gets tangled up in English, for example in the popular temptation to use Latin endings for words that look Latin, like octopus. Greek and Latin have shaped about half the words English speakers use today, including almost all of our technical and scientific terminology. It’s been a long time since English-speaking children learned Greek and Latin in school, but the effects of traditional “Western” classical education are still all around us. ![]() Modern English is the result of a grand linguistic experiment in creative packaging, in that the roots of its grammar are characteristically Germanic, but its vocabulary is dominated by the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. ![]()
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