Julie with a B

Friday, February 18, 2005
 
You mean like octopi??? No not like that....
JR over at Texican Tattler's had a provocotive little snippet about actor Tom Sizemore and his use of a fake penis. JR opined "In other news, they make prosthetic penises (peni?) ."
Nope, that's not the correct Latin spelling.
"Guessing the plural of a Latin word is one of those things where a little learning is a dangerous thing (but that's still "not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance," to quote Terry Pratchett). Those with entirely too much learning know that Latin nouns are divided into five categories, called declensions. To figure out the plural of a Latin noun without cheating (i.e., looking it up), it is necessary, and often sufficient, to know which of the five declensions it belongs to. (There are a few nouns, like virus, that don't fit neatly into any of the declensions, but more on that later). For example, you mention peni as a possible plural of penis. The -i ending is valid for forming the plural of second-declension Latin nouns ending in -us, but of course that doesn't apply to penis. Part of the problem is that when unaccented, the singular endings -us and -is tend to be pronounced the same in English. Those with a little learning know that penus, if it were a second declension noun like most -us nouns in Latin, would be expected to have the plural form peni. Since penus would be pronounced the same--or almost the same--as penis in English, the temptation is strong to use the incorrect peni as the plural. Peni is an example of what is called pseudo-Latin, something that looks like Latin but isn't. A similar mistake is using porpi as the plural of porpoise, but in that case the singular was long spelled porpus under the mistaken impression that it was a Latin word.
Penis is a third declension noun, not second declension. These nouns often end in -is in the singular and -es in the plural. The English style -ises is sometimes preferred. Hence, we have penises (half of us do, anyway), and mantises and pelvises, but only more rarely do you see penes, mantes, and pelves, though they are not incorrect. In many cases, only the Latin form is acceptable: We have testes (some more than others) and crises and psychoses, but never testises, crisises, or pyschosises. "

The article goes on at some length.... but I'm sure you get the point?

- posted by JulieB @ 3:01 PM
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