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Currently, octopuses is the most common form in both the US and the UK; *octopodes is rare, and octopi is often objectionable.
-wiki
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Also the ever brilliant 'octopi' rather than the correct 'octopuses'.
Or the facetious, though "correct" in Greek octopodes.
So would you say then that we have no gendered grammer or just neuter grammer if gendered at all?
I would say that English does not have grammatical gender for nouns and adjectives, but some seem to think it has remnants of gender in its pronominal system. One of the big things about grammatical gender in language systems is that gender usually gets marked in more than one word. For example, in Latin, puer Romanus 'Roman boy' and pouella Graeca 'Greek girl', the adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with the nouns the qualify.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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and octopi is often objectionable.
My favorite, annoying learned plural is apparatus for apparatus. In Latin, the -us of the plural form is with a long u. Apparati is right out.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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... some funny attempts (by folks with little Latin and less Greek) to replicate plurals in English with words borrowed from Latin, e.g., *opii as the plural of opus, virii as the plural of virus, etc. The additional i is particularly irritating to some. It's as though the singulars were opius and virius.
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addict
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Personal favourite pet hate is when sheep gains an incorrect -s when pluralised and fish an -es.
(When -es is added to words ending in s when -' is the correct addition I tend to get ever so slightly mad)
----The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false----
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Carpal Tunnel
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when sheep gains an incorrect -s when pluralised and fish an -es.
Actually, fish is the plural of fish when speaking of a single species of fish, but when multiple species are involved fishes is the "correct" plural. In Jacobean English fishes is perfectly OK. It appears numerous times in the King James version of the Bible, including the story about the fishes and loaves.
I've never heard sheeps, but I don't doubt that somebody might try to make sheep plural.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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We loves Sheepses, yessss we do!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Sheep is only plural. The singular is shoop.
And the plural of book is beech. I hate it when people say books
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Two of my favourite rare plurals are
egg > eyren/eggys
shoe > shoon
but unfortunately whenever they are used you tend to get a look of total incomprehension.
I always believed shoop to be a humourous back-etymology of sheep following the likes of feet/foot and geese/goose and not the actual singular of sheep which I always thought was both singular and plural. (I may be wrong though)
----The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false----
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Sometimes what you always believed is true.
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