Friday, July 23, 2010





















In conclusion....

Several observations:





  1. Salve,

    Very nice! This is excellent. In fact, this is probably the most detailed treatment of the etymology and history of the word I've ever seen.

    The statement "The plural of "syllabus" is most correctly "syllabi"." is certainly right in Latin (Neo-Latin if you will), but English can always just do the default -es ending. At any rate, since syllabus is in fact Neo-Latin, the plural syllabi is not wrong, nor is it a "hypercorrection," as people have recently taken to call it.

    Anyway, there is one thing that doesn't seem right here. You said:


    But Greek loan-words into Latin don't do that. I mean, that stage of philological hypercorrection is so, well, hypercorrect that it doesn't really reflect any sort of real method of word formation in Latin or Greek!

    The Latin suffixes -tus and -sus (stems -tu- and -su-, fourth declension) are attached to Latin roots and stems to form verbal nouns. And when they do so, the consonant can undergo various types of phonetic change (e.g. VID [root of videre] + -tus -> VIDtus -> vissus -> visus, "sight"). But Greek doesn't have such a suffix (there isn't even a fourth declension in that language!), so such verbals can neither take a -u- marker nor come in without a dental! The closest that Greek has is -τυ- (nominative -τυς), as in ἐδητύς ("food"), but that would be transliterated as -tys, and it's of the third declension. And even that would not explain why a Greek-declension suffix jumped to the Latin fourth declension seeingly spontaneously. Further, even if we wanted to use the Latin suffixes on the appropriate stem of συλλαμβάνω (συλλαβ-, syllab-), we would have SYLLAB (used as a Latin root) + -tus -> SYLLABtus -> syllaptus (as in scriptus from SCRIB + -tus), which is not anything like syllabūs! So, simply put, the formation method is completely wrong and the resultant form is wrong as well!

    So, we're still left with the question "Where did this fourth-declension-for-syllabus idea come from?" Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that someone just pulled it from his or her gluteal-buttular area. Moreover, I think your original "Bet you didn't even know there *was* a fourth declension, did you?" idea is right on the money. Someone probably saw that others were proscribing against the second-declension plural of syllabus and then assumed that the word is of the seemingly next-worthy-candidate declension: the fourth.

  2. Thank you for this article, it was a fascinating read. Ironically, it was intellectual pornography by a deconstructionist!

    I have to question the logic of your first conclusion point thought. It seems this world 'syllabus' never actually existed in either Greek or Latin in antiquity. It became adopted, through various corruptions, into neo-latin (correct me if I have misunderstood). That being said, the word is essentially a mongrel in whatever language it ends up being used in and should probably just follow the rules of that language. That would make 'syllabuses' probably the most satisfactory spelling on balance.

  3. Nice piece. I'm not sure I agree with James, though. It seems that the usual norms are that when language B borrows something from Language A, then (especially if B is English and A is Latin) B keeps A's plural form, most of the time. And the question of how the word managed to show up in language A to begin with doesn't matter. A lot of words in a lot of languages have odd stories about their origin in that language -- mistakes, over-generalizations, whatever. But however it got there, once it's there and part of that language, then the inheritor language just takes it as a part of the original language. In other words, mongrel status is not inherited. Once it became a standard part of neo-Latin, then it was a standard part of neo-Latin. How it got that status doesn't matter, at least not for English plural purposes.