Niggling point of Latin grammar

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GrzeszDeL

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Shouldn’t this place be called “fora.catholic.com” instead of “forums.catholic.com”? Shouldn’t we be setting a good example for others? I mean, if Catholics cannot do Latin grammar, who can?

😉
 
Forum has come into English again due to its use on the Internet to describe interactive message boards. In this second entry into the English language the accepted plural is the common English form of appending “S”.

Does that help ease your conscience any? 😃

-D
 
In general, when words are adopted into English, they should be made to conform to English rules. They should not be allowed to drag the rules of their original languages with them. That just creates confusion.

DaveBj
 
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GrzeszDeL:
Shouldn’t this place be called “fora.catholic.com” instead of “forums.catholic.com”? Shouldn’t we be setting a good example for others? I mean, if Catholics cannot do Latin grammar, who can?

😉
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Well, heck - if you’re gonna niggle… look again at the URL…it does NOT say forums.catholic-questions.org… it says forum.catholic.org…

good singular Latin second declension neuter nominative noun. You have out-argued yourself! 😃
 
I agree it should be fora. That is what i use anyway.
In general, when words are adopted into English, they should be made to conform to English rules. They should not be allowed to drag the rules of their original languages with them. That just creates confusion.
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Dave’s point is not a good one-given that in the past, when a word is borrowed recently, it retains at least the singular/plural forms from the original language. If we were to conform words to usages, we should change media to mediums, and data to datums, children to childs, men/women to mans/womans, propaganda to propagandums ad infinitum. Not practical or feasible.

In Christ,
Adam
 
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akemner:
I agree it should be fora. That is what i use anyway.

Dave’s point is not a good one-given that in the past, when a word is borrowed recently, it retains at least the singular/plural forms from the original language. If we were to conform words to usages, we should change media to mediums, and data to datums, children to childs, men/women to mans/womans, propaganda to propagandums ad infinitum. Not practical or feasible.

In Christ,
Adam
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I know, the genie is already out of the bottle. I much prefer the Russian way of doing things–borrowed (or stolen) words get completely russified.

BTW, I can almost read your sig 😃

DaveBj
 
Latin words adopted in English sometimes retain their former ways of making the plural, e.g. bacterium, bacteria, however most of the time they adopt the english method, while sometiems still retaining the latin as an acceptable way too. Stadiums should be stadia.
 
The reason is most people in this country don’t have an education.
Why do they spell “altar”, alter"?
Yes, stadium should be stadia
Forum = fora
Alumnae / alumnus is alums (for both male and female) now.
and on and on.

(I saw a poster on the wall in the training room where I work part-time that said “Were glad your here”) I have to work for a bunch of morons.
 
Its a shame that grammar has gotten so bad. There just not teaching it in schools. 😃

And have you noticed that adverbs are an endangered species? Every time I hear that ad for the vision program and they say, “See clearer and sharper”. And the traffic lady says, “Get home quicker”. Like nails on the blackboard. :mad:
 
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Mary1973:
Its a shame that grammar has gotten so bad. There just not teaching it in schools. 😃

And have you noticed that adverbs are an endangered species? Every time I hear that ad for the vision program and they say, “See clearer and sharper”. And the traffic lady says, “Get home quicker”. Like nails on the blackboard. :mad:
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Maybe not in New Jersey, but there teaching it real good in South Carolina; at least that’s what the data points to. Nope, what really seperates the men from the boys here is spelling.
 
If English consistently adopted the plural forms of foreign words, I would agree to the use of fora. However, many examples have already been provided to show that this is not the case. The problem is that when a language begins to integrate foreign words, there is confusion over the underlying codes that tell us how language is formed (I learned about this in a course in Austria, so I’m trying to convey the meaning of Tiefencodes, which is itself a linguistic hybrid). Essentially, the best way to avoid confusion is to force the codes of the foreign language to give way to the codes of the assimilating language. After all, if we were to truly be sticklers about maintaining foreign grammars with assimilated words, we would have to do some weird things with our sentences (e.g., place Spanish-derived adjectives after the noun, drop the adjective/adverb distinction on all words taken from German, maintain the use of genders and expand distinctions between cases, etc.). That’s not too feasible, so why not just force those foreign words into the mold we already have?
 
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