RE: Ask a lesbian
June 23, 2013 at 2:29 pm
(This post was last modified: June 23, 2013 at 2:32 pm by Angrboda.)
(June 23, 2013 at 6:26 am)NoraBrimstone Wrote: I have a question... What the hell is wrong with penii?
Quote: Dear Straight Dope:
What exactly is the plural of penis? I would say penises, but it seems too simple and obvious. Is it penis, like deer, or maybe peni, like fungi?
— Sissy, Emerald Isle, NC
If you have more than one, you should be writing to Ripley's and not to the Straight Dope. Heck, Sissy, if you have even one, the first thing you should do is change your name to Buddy.
In this case, your first instinct is a good one. The English-style plural is usually acceptable and often preferred. When you don't know what the Latin plural is and don't have a dictionary handy, you should choose the English-style plural rather than try to guess. (Sometimes even dictionaries will steer you wrong; see below). In your example, penises is a perfectly good plural of penis in English. Many people who deal with penises professionally use the Latin-style plural penes instead. That's fine too, but even among urologists, penises seem to predominate. Seems, rather. "Penises" seems to predominate.
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.
There is one more common English -us word borrowed from Latin that doesn't follow any of the rules above: virus. To the Romans a virus was a dangerous or disgusting substance, anything from snake venom to body odor. Ancient grammarians couldn't agree whether the word was a third-declension noun, a fourth-declension noun or in a class by itself, but the one thing they could agree on was that it didn't have a plural form. Ever. To the Romans, it was a mass noun, not a count noun. That hasn't stopped English writers from inventing pseudo-Latin plural forms to cover the modern countable senses of the word. Viri is formed on the false assumption that virus is a second-declension noun. (Viri in fact is the plural of Latin vir, "man".) Virii is an even worse mistake. Only Latin nouns that end in -ius form the plural with -ii. There are no really common English plurals in -ii other than radii. That hasn't stopped people from trying out such atrocious forms as virii and penii. Virii would be the plural of virius, if such a word existed in Latin. Other suggested plurals include virora, vira, virua, and vire. For more on the debate, see http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus. html. The one inescapable fact is that in classical Latin, there was no plural of the word. In English, the only correct plural is viruses.
— (The article is long, dense, and pedantic, but quite filled with information.)
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