My employer has decided to include a certain position emeritus on the letterhead, and so has come the question of the proper plural of "emeritus."
According to my Webster's unabridged,
emeritus...<Latin, past part. of emerere to obtain by service, to complete one's term, fr. e + merere to earn, serve one's term ...> 2: retired from an office or position esp after gaining public or professional recognition ... often used postpositively <professor ~> and sometimes converted to emeriti after a plural substantive <professors emeriti>
My first impulse was to say that the plural of emeritus was emeriti, but that use of sometimes in the definition gave me pause. So, I thought I'd ask you latin scholars. Would you indicate two Chief Judges emeritus as Chief Judges Emeriti?
i ain't no latin scholar, but i would write "Emeritus Chief Justices", emeritus being used as an adjective and all.
I would barely qualify as a Latin scholar if I knew anything but, if you really wanna wow 'em.
Singular Plural
Nominative emeritus emeriti
Genitive emeriti emeritorum
Dative emerito emeritis
Accusative emeritum emeritos
Ablative emerito emeritis
Vocative emerite emeriti
Course that's just masculine and mixed sex plural. If it's females it goes to first declension.
Whether it's male or female depends on the genitives, doesn't it??
Whether it's male or female depends on the genitives, doesn't it??
Thanks, Faldage. It happens that all the former Chief Judges are male, so the lists you provided suit. But I don't pretend to know anything about Latin, so could you please identify for me which of these would be proper to use in describing former CJs on a letterhead?
[thank-you-hug icon]
all the former Chief Judges are male
All the former Chief Justices are male, but I am not sure the same is true of the former Chief Judges. I believe a jurist sitting on the US Supreme Court is properly titled Justice, not Judge.
But query [to which I know no answer]: how do the two terms differ?
Sparteye:
You could use either emeritus or emeriti after the words Chief Judges. Emeritus is the nominative case singular, while emeriti is the plural in the nominative case.
Latin is an inflected language, which means that the same word has different endings depending upon where it goes in the sentence and how other parts of speech are acting upon and with it.
The nominative case is in essence the subject of a sentence. I throw the ball. the word "I" would be in the nominate case (ego) if you translated the sentence into Latin. It would be something like this: Ego bolum jaco. I am going back 40 years here, so I might be wrong, but I think throw in Latin is jaco, jacere, jacti, jactus. When you are "defining" a verb in Latin, you give the first person singular present tense, jaco, the infinitive "to throw" jacere, the first person past hmm participle (I am thrown) or jacti, and a future tense of some kind, jactus, which means "I will be thrown" or something like that. Some Latin scholar is going to correct me on this, but I think it's pretty close.
Bolum, if I remember correctly, is the accusative case singular for bola.
But the more or less nonsense sentence "The farmer throws me" would come out something like "Agricola meum jacat." Meum may not be the first person singular accusative for ego, but I'm only trying to show that the object of the sentence has a different form than the subject. Just as it does in English as a matter of fact. But much of English is not inflected.
If the farmer is wrestling the sailor, it would be "the farmer throws the sailor" or "the sailor throws the farmer." It's almost all positional. In Latin it would be "agrocola nautam jacat" or "nauta agricolam jacat." But you can take the same sentences and put the words in ANY order in Latin and still know what it says, because position is unimportant. Not totally unimportant, except in simple sentences like this.
Getting back to Chief Judges emeritus vs. Chief Judges emeriti, they both mean retired chief judges. It's my lay view that emeriti is slightly hoi aristoi and that most people would use emeritus, since we do not use inflection in any significant way.
TEd
Interesting question. I thought it would be a simple matter of looking at my well-worn pamphlet in which is printed the US Constitution. But I was wrong.
Article 3, which establishes the judiciary, refers to the "Judges" of both the supreme and inferior courts. It is only in Article 1, Section 4, Cluase 6, that you find the term Justice: "When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside. . .."
Further in Article 2, Section 2, clause 2, that the President "shall nominate . . . Judges of the supreme(sic) Court. . .." There is no Constitutional provision for the President to appoint judges of the "inferior courts". My assumption is that when Congress created the inferior Federal Courts they authorized the president to nominate the judges therefor.
US Code Title 28, section 1, provides The Supreme Court of the United States shall consist of a Chief Justice of the United States and eight associate justices, any six of whom shall constitute a quorum. So, while Chief Justice is somewhat etched into the Constitution, the titles of the associate justices is simply statutory in nature. I suppose one could make an argument that there is nothing in the Constitution to specify that the Chief Justice referred to in Article 2 has nothing to do with the Supreme Court, which is composed of judges, but I suspect that argument wouldn't get very far.
Section 43 provides for the courts of appeals that "(t)he President shall appoint, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, circuit judges . . .."
My guess is that the use of the word judges for members of the Supreme Court in the Constitution is more or less an error, but of course there can be no "error" in the Constitution, and that the FFs had decided on the term of justice for the Supreme Court, based upon specific reference to Chief Justice in Article 2. I believe the use of justice parallels what is found in England.
This is probably boring as all holy hell to those who aren't US attorneys or like me a self-taught scholar of our Constitution.
TEd who secretly wanted to be an attorney but who never worked hard enough to get into law school
Whether it's male or female depends on the genitives, doesn't it??
Only if somebody gets accusative regarding where their genitives have been, in which case they may become ablative.
I would say no, don't use the plural. English adjectives don't have plurals. If we continued to inflect whole phrases as if in the language they came from, we'd say 'courts martials'; but we say 'courts martial' (if adhering to French style - or of course 'court martials' if wholly Englishing it).
The principle is probably that English has a category of plurality in nouns, and we admit foreign ways of forming it. But we don't ever import foreign grammar as such.
For example, you don't run 'emeritus' through the Latin cases, and say 'Oh, Professor Emerite', and 'give it to the professor emerito'. Adjectival plural is in the same boat: it's a feature of Latin grammar but not of English.
It would be different if the whole phrase was Latin: and indeed professor emeritus could be considered so, but its plural would then be professores emeriti.
Thanks Nicholas, for saying what I would have said if you hadn't said it first. While you can certain use emeriti and you would be absolutely correct linguistically from the point of view of Latin, every resource I've looked at says it is either uncommon or unusual usage. Stick to emeritus.
Actually, I incline rather than decline towards tsuwm's approach.
Of course, you could just say that they're pensioned off, or put out to grass or have been sent to the knacker's yard, or something.
In reply to:
All the former Chief Justices are male, but I am not sure the same is true of the former Chief Judges. I believe a jurist sitting on the US Supreme Court is properly titled Justice, not Judge.
I work in the Michigan court system, Keiva, and so I'm talking about Michigan courts. Members of the judiciary sitting on the Michigan Supreme Court call themselves Justices, while members of the judiciary on the lower courts -- including the Court of Appeals -- are Judges.
The Michigan Court of Appeals has only had a few Chief Judges:
T John Lesinski
Robert Danhof
Martin Doctoroff
Maura Corrigan
Richard Bandstra
While not all of these are male, the two who are still on the Court and thus to be designated as emeritus/emeriti/emeritorum/emerito/emeritis/emeritum/emeritos/emerito/emerite are both male.
[slapping his forehiead at own stupidity -e] Spart, eye neglected to see the Michigan connection. Sorry.
Why are so many of y'all having havers over a simple question which has a simple answer? A Latin passive participle, the 4th of the 4 principle parts of most verbs, is often used as an adjective, and is always given in the nominative singular masculine form and in the 2nd Declension form and is declined accordingly. A single judge who is a man would be a Judge emeritus, a woman would be a Judge emerita; two women Judges emeritae, two or more all men or a mixture of men and women, Judges emeriti. It's exacly the same as alumnus: you have one alumnus or alumna, two alumni or alumnae.
Jimthedog: Did you see the correct answer, or have you not got that far yet?
Incidentally, the above is not just an academic position -- I have actually seen a woman referred to as a something-or-other emerita. As to the propriety of mixing an English word with a Latin modifier and declining the Latin (at least as far as respects number and gender -- we don't pay attention to case), this is not infrequent. In fact, there is a word for it : macaronic.
In fact, there is a word for it : macaronic.
Does macaronic refer to whenever more than one language appears in a linguistic unit?
"We slipped out of the theatre, before the pas de deux."
In other words, how do you know macaroni when you see it?
Noodle head,
WW
well, the "original meaning" (hi bill) pertained to poesy and went something like this: Used to designate a burlesque form of verse in which vernacular words are introduced into a Latin context with Latin terminations and in Latin constructions. Also, applied to similar verse of which the basis is Greek instead of Latin; and loosely to any form of verse in which two or more languages are mingled together.
buthence® of language, style, etc.: Resembling the mixed jargon of macaronic poetry.
[The word seems to have been invented by Teofilo Folengo (‘Merlinus Cocaius’) whose ‘macaronic’ poem (Liber Macaronices) was published in 1517. He explains (ed. 2, 1521) that the ‘macaronic art’ is so called from macaroni, which is ‘quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum’.]
btw, byb, what is "a mixture of men and women"?
btw, byb, what is "a mixture of men and women"?Depends on context:
(a) An orgy
(b) A crowd
(c) A hermaphrodite
so ck, do you adjudge that byb was speaking of orgy emeriti?
Interesting fine distinction of terms here -- and a subtle confilict within AHD:
1) AHD, under "mixture', claimes that "blend and amalgam imply that the original components have lost their distinctness" [hence inapposite here]", -- but that "mixture has the widest application".
2) But elsewhere, under "mixed" and "mix (transitive)", AHD implies that the principal meaning is "blended".
I am reminded of the first bawdy comment I ever heard from my father's mouth. Debunking one who oversimplified by asserting what "the average American" wants, my father, "The Average American has one t*t and one b*ll."