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

[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?