Virus Scan Order

[John Rudd]

On Jun 2, 2004, at 7:24 PM, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Michele Neylon :: Blacknight Solutions wrote:
>
>>
>> FYI - the plural of virus is viruses
>
> I went to our Classics dept a while back and asked our resident
> scholar,
> who speaks Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, Polish, and probably other
> languages.  She said that correct Latin is "viri", not "virii".  But
> she
> also said that "viri" will look strange to most people and suggested
> that
> the English translation to "viruses" would be correct.  Being in
> academia, I just had to ask.  There ya go.
>

Our resident expert on linguistics (who is also one of the people who
works on the oxford english dictionary) had this to say about it:


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Geoffrey K. Pullum" <pullum at ling.ucsc.edu>
> Date: May 13, 2002 1:48:57 PM PDT
> To: bhorn at cats.ucsc.edu, jeo at cats.ucsc.edu
> Cc: anoe at cats.ucsc.edu, coord at cats.ucsc.edu, pullum at cats.ucsc.edu
> Subject: Re: virii or viruses?
>
> There are six candidates on offer:
>
> "viri"
>   If "virus" were like "focus/foci" (masculine) the plural would be
>   "viri".  This is in fact the correct plural of "vir", meaning man,
>   but definitely not of "virus", meaning venom.
>
> "virus"
>   I incorrectly thought at first that "virus" was a fourth-declension
>   word like "status" or "circus", and that would have meant that the
>   plural looked the same as the singular.  But these things are not
>   the case.  And certainly not in English.
>
> No plural at all.
>   In fact, "virus" is a neuter noun in Latin, like "pelagus" (neuter),
>   meaning sea, and according to Kennedy's Latin Primer there is NO
> Latin
>   plural for it.  It was never used in the plural
>
> "vira"
>   According to UCSC's Dean of Humanities, if "virus" did have a plural
>   in use in Latin, it would be "vira".
>
> "virii"
>   If "virus" had been spelled "virius" and was like "filius"
> (masculine),
>   meaning son, then the plural would have been "virii"; these things
> are
>   not so, and "virii" is just a piece of playful hacker invention (now
>   very common; use it if it gives you pleasure).
>
> "viruses"
>   The only plural for "virus" in the English language is "viruses"
>   -- unquestionably the safe and most uncontroversial choice.
>
> GKP
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----
> Geoffrey K. Pullum *  pullum at ling.ucsc.edu   *
> http://ling.ucsc.edu/~pullum
> Stevenson College  *  University of California, Santa Cruz  *  CA
> 95064-1077
> Office: (831)459-4705    *   Messages: (831)459-2555   *  Fax:
> (831)459-3334
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----
> THE CAMBRIDGE GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE:
> http://www.cambridge.org/cgel
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----

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