Subscribe(For the record, that’s the plural of “hiatus,” not the mispelling of a country)
Posting’s going to be light for about a week. The arrival of my extended family tomorrow will segue into my brother’s wedding weekend, which might segue into moving he and his wife into their new apartment; also, I’ve gotten slammed with a lot of (admittedly exciting) responsibility here at work, specifically whipping out a prototype for a portal in about a week. Couldn’t have come at a worse time.
At any rate, I’ll try to get Friday Random Ten in, but don’t expect much else until things slow down to a normal rate.
Rusty
/ Wednesday, July 5th, 2006I’ll start by saying that I’ve never taken any kind of Latin class, but here goes. Most commonly, Latin words ending with -us have plurals that end in -i, such as nucleus (pl. nuclei) and succubus (pl. succubi). Therefore, in theory the plural of hiatus would be hiati, not *hiatii which has nicked an extra i from somewhere. *Hiatii would, still in theory, be the plural of some word *hiatius, in the same way that radii is the plural of radius.
…
So I was just about to correct hiatii to hiati, but thought I should do some research first. It turns out that hiatus is a rare case of a fourth declension noun, for which the only inflection for (singular) plural is to lengthen the final vowel. This of course gets lost in written English, and therefore the plural of hiatus is, in fact, hiatus.
Don’t you just “love” (insert :bah: smiley) Latin?
Ben
/ Wednesday, July 5th, 2006I should have written (and didn’t) that I had no clue if it was actually the plural of “hiatus” or not. I was just being whimsical.
abou
/ Wednesday, July 5th, 2006hiātus, -ūs, m opening, abyss; open mouth, gaping; (gram) hiatus
singluar
nominative: hiātus
genitive: hiātūs
dative: hiātuī
accusative: hiātum
ablative: hiātū
plural
nominative: hiātūs
genitive: hiātuum – double “u” pronounced separately
dative: hiātibus
accusative: hiātūs
ablative: hiātibus
… what? I know Latin.
Rusty
/ Thursday, July 6th, 2006Clarity is king, Helio.
-us > -ii is one of my pet hates anyway. It happened on SOT once, but I can’t find it now.