a question in my notes from this afternoon

[fox]

why is the plural of lexicon not lexica?

[eta:  dudes!

Main Entry: lex·i·con
Pronunciation: 'lek-s&-"kän also -k&n
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural lex·i·ca /-k&/; or lexicons
Etymology: Late Greek lexikon, from neuter of lexikos of words, from Greek lexis word, speech, from legein to say -- more at LEGEND
1 : a book containing an alphabetical arrangement of the words in a language and their definitions : DICTIONARY
2 a : the vocabulary of a language, an individual speaker or group of speakers, or a subject b : the total stock of morphemes in a language
3 : REPERTOIRE, INVENTORY

i hereby recommend that we all start using lexica ... whenever we ... happen to ... need to talk about ... more than one ... lexicon ... okay.  well, look for it in my thesis, then! heh.]

Comments

[sowilo.livejournal.com]

what is the plural of lexicon? lexicons?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

ayup.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

now that i think about it, i suppose it's possible it's not lexic+on, but lex+icon. or, even if that's not it -- more to the point, the ending is -on rather than -ion, which is the source (criterion~criteria) of my not-really-expectation of *lexica.

damn. would have been cool. :-)

[madbonnycaptain.livejournal.com]

Also there's phenomenon to phenomena - I think it's the -con that does it.

I'm in between classes right now, so I can't remember the rule, and unfortunately I've no idea where my Latin workbook from school is... but I've got the other Latin book, the one my sister gave me for Christmas or whatever it was, that I never use. But at least I know where it is.

Drop me a line so I remember, I'll see if I can find it tonight?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

don't forget to look it up. :-) but while phenomenon came through latin (and thanks for that! -- i couldn't think of another example), i believe criterion and lexicon came straight from greek.

when looking this up, however, with my trusty m-w.com (http://www.m-w.com), i found that lexica is the first-listed plural of lexicon! i swear i'd never seen it in print or heard it spoken before. but, am editing the post to reflect this. :-)

[madbonnycaptain.livejournal.com]

well yay!

I know not Greek, despite RPing a Greek goddess (but what the hell, I just say what she tells me to say, so that's easy enough), so... unless you want I should ask my dad, who DOES, and may or may not be awake when I get home from class...


... *shrugs?*

[cannons-at-dawn.livejournal.com]

Lexica is a fab word. I'm going to try hard to slip it into conversation.

[foulds.livejournal.com]

Fortunately classics have the answer. Lexicon is from the Greek, and thus technically doesn't play by latin rules. The thing is, Greek neuter plurals aren't really plural; they go singular in agreement, and are effectively singular in every way (including verbs they take). Therefore to call the plural of lexicon lexica would be

-wrong
-blatant disregard for the language it came from
-blindly attempting to enforce latin on a Greek word

In fact, as Lexicon is neuter, the plural is lexicon, like sheep and sheep. As English probably doesn't like that, we just shove an 's' on the end.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

-blindly attempting to enforce latin on a Greek word

... by analogy with criterion~criteria?

i do have a friend who gets annoyed when people make the plural of octopus into octopi, as the ending is not -us but -pus (and not latin, but greek!) and so the plural should be octopoda, or so i'm told. but she doesn't go about enforcing this. :-)

but in any event, i went to georgetown, where we've been cheerfully mixing greek and latin for centuries. hoya saxa!

[foulds.livejournal.com]

Sadly criterion comes from a different Greek base, as, I do believe, it is a hideous 222 noun, and so looks neuter, but is masculine, and thus DOES quite correctly go criteria (it's the ion ia, as opposed to -on -a that gives it away). Only neuters do the funnt trick I mentioned. Many will go -a in plural.

If, however, you were keen to find a resolution, then you could argue that as English doesn't do agreements between forms, then lexica is in theory acceptable (in as far as English has made a bigger cock up of many other classically based forms), though technically wrong, if I was being pedantic, which, as I classicist, I am wont to do. You almost certainly can find many examples of Greek based words being incorrectly made into latinised forms, but, like so many errors in the English language, that doesn't make it correct.

Ie, the plural of hippopotamus should be hippopotamoi, but I doubt you'll find that anywhere, and as Television is half latin and half Greek, God knows what its plural ought to be.

And your friend is correct;

An octopus is technically an 'oktopous' ('eight foot'). It should indeed be, in plural, Octopoda, but got mangled into octopus and everyone started assuming it was latin, which it isn't. *le sigh*

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

people do get things in their heads and overgeneralize, it's quite true. i had a student who wanted to talk about more than one corpus, so he went with *corpi (pronounced core-pie, of course) -- and i stopped the whole class and had a two-minute tangent about the plural suffix -ora and how it's really perfectly okay to say corpuses rather than put a wrong latin ending on a word because we think we're being erudite. (only i did it without snarking at the kid. [g])

which i suppose means i shall have to abandon lexica. very sad.

[orange852.livejournal.com]

You guys are, like, total linguist geeks, aren't you?

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

I once saw "apparati" -- published. Almost fell out of my chair. That would be "apparātus, apparātūs, m.," fourth declension, for the four people left on Earth who still care.

But what I really want is for you to convince the world to use "fora."

Yeah, I'm behind on LJ -- what of it?