pegasuses, pegasae?

[Frosty]

If in doubt, form a regular English plural (i.e. "Pegasuses" in this case). Don't take any notice of classics snobs telling you otherwise - so few people know Greek and Latin these days that expecting the application of their irregular plural formation on obscure English words is just stupid. Same goes for the split infinitive "rule", which is just a misguided attempt to apply Latin verb rules to English words.

Good call!

 

[hong]

Idiots. Everyone knows that the plural of pegasi is pegasii.

 

[Dinkeldog]

add janni, djinni, and efreeti to your list.

Except that those work "backwords" so that the singular is "djinni" and the plural is actually "djinn".

This anal retentive moment is brought to you by the letter "i" and dictionary.com

 

[tarchon]

If in doubt, form a regular English plural (i.e. "Pegasuses" in this case). Don't take any notice of classics snobs telling you otherwise - so few people know Greek and Latin these days that expecting the application of their irregular plural formation on obscure English words is just stupid. Same goes for the split infinitive "rule", which is just a misguided attempt to apply Latin verb rules to English words.

Is it? Which Latin verb rule is that?

While it is true that nobody's forcing you not to say "pegasuses," that doesn't make it sound any less clumsy. The Latin -us/-i plurals have probably held on longer in common use than most borrowed-word plurals just because English speakers often find multisyllabic singular forms ending in vowel+'s' to be a little awkward to pluralize, particularly if another 's' has directly preceded it. In fact, there is some tendency to overgeneralize the -i plural to words like "octopus", "virus", and "apparatus" (I've even heard "thesi" for the pl. of "thesis") where it isn't historically supported.

If you're a pure descriptivist, you have to accept that the -i plural is at least marginally generative, and if you're a prescriptivist, you clearly have accepted usage on the side of it as well.

Plus from the descriptive side, it's obvious that pegasi is overwhelmingly preferred by common usage. Altavista searching (for English) "pegasi" AND NOT "51 Pegasi" AND NOT "star" (to eliminate astronomical references) gets 2989 pages vs. 158 for "pegasuses," so the pegasi form is preferred at least 20 to 1.

 

[mmadsen]

If in doubt, form a regular English plural (i.e. "Pegasuses" in this case). Don't take any notice of classics snobs telling you otherwise - so few people know Greek and Latin these days that expecting the application of their irregular plural formation on obscure English words is just stupid.

On the other hand, if you're not at all interested in Latin or Greek, why aren't you just calling them "winged horses"?

 

[jgbrowning]

heh

On the other hand, if you're not at all interested in Latin or Greek, why aren't you just calling them "winged horses"?

cause then the'd just drop "winged horse ****" down on my PC's instead of Pegasi doo-doo!

style, my man, style....

joe b.

 

[hong]

On the other hand, if you're not at all interested in Latin or Greek, why aren't you just calling them "winged horses"?

Idiots. Everyone knows that the plural of winged horse is winged horsen.

 

[Piratecat]

Pegasox.