A brief, somewhat goofy spin-off from my 11/18 posting “The visiopun”, about plurals of the English noun octopus, which entertained mostly octopi (borrowing the Latin plural, but giving it an English spelling-pronunciation /áktǝpàj/) and octopuses (with the default plural suffix for English nouns), but also entertaining octopodes (borrowed from Classical Greek, so learnèd and obscure). The posting inspired a Facebook exchange today, starting with:
— Gadi Niram: I love the [four-syllable] plural octopodes, but it’s really not suited to most communication.
To which I replied:
— AZ > GN (amplifying on GN’s reservations): It has the primary accent on the second syllable: òctópodes, like àntípodes. … At first I was hoping for óctopòdes or òctopódes, cleaving more closely to the accent pattern of óctopùs. But reality is weirder than that.
James Unger (emeritus professor of Japanese at Ohio State, specializing in historical linguistics and the writing systems of East Asia) then switched from octopus to rhinoceros:
— JU: Once, while eating lunch in Yale Commons, I was bantering with Stanley Insler about the works of Ionesco and called them his rhinoceroi as a joke. The taciturn Warren Cowgill unexpectedly looked up from his plate and solemnly said, “Mr. Unger! Surely rhinocerotes!”
The allusion is to the Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionescu’s 1959 absurdist play Rhinoceros. And the story involves two remarkable Yale scholars of comparative-historical linguistics: Stanley Insler (1937 – 2019), the Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale; and Warren Cowgill (1929 – 1985), Professor of Linguistics at Yale, specializing in comparative Indo-European linguistics.
November 22, 2023 at 7:27 am |
I had always assumed that “octopodes” had the stress pattern of English “octopus(es)”, but I suppose it shouldn’t be altogether surprising that it mimics similar Greek words & names such as “Euripides”.