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this is something I've found puzzling ever since I read John Fowles' "The Magus" many years ago -- why is 'magus' pronounced with a hard 'g' and 'magi' with a soft 'g'?
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Pooh-Bah
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>why is 'magus' pronounced with a hard 'g' and 'magi' with a soft 'g'?
There are other examples following the same rule:
Hard “G”
Gu: Gus; Angus; Gut; Gun
Ge: Get
Go: Got
Soft “G”
Gi: Gin; Magic; Tragic; Gibralter
Ge: Gentle; Gentile; Gentry; Agent; Agenda
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following the same rule
Be more convincing if it was AnJus or Gus as the alternatives, Jo, since magi and magus are twins.
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yes... more to the point, magi it the plural of magus.
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While we await one of our Latin scholars (O Faldage, where art thou?) to appear, let me throw in my guess:
To rephrase what Jo said: Just as the C (cf. celtic) was pronounced K in Latin, as far as we know, so was the G a hard sound and not soft (cf. Regina - hard G sound). Today we pronounce the singular and plural as we do because of English conventions governing the G sound in the two pre-vowel environments.
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To rephrase what AnnaS. just said: it's the same as the pronunciation rule for c. Soft before e and i, hard before a, o, and u. That's not to say there aren't exceptions--this is English, after all. 
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old hand
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old hand
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I'm no Latin expert but I know Italian, which has the same rules as outlined (more or less) by jmh above: G followed by a,o or u = hard G (e.g. gatto (cat)) G followed by e or i = soft (e.g. gelato (ice cream) is pronounced "jelato") If you need a hard G followed by E or I you stick in an H (e.g. spaghetti) So magus/magi makes sense to me, in a transferring-Italian-rules-to-English sort of way! 
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magus/magi makes sense to me
Maybe. What had initially struck me as odd was the change made to the root phoneme <mag> by two different suffixes. This is looking, after all at two variants of one word, not two completely different orthographies embodying general rules. Is this common - I can't think of parralels right now, but doubtless someone can help...
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As Jo noted Ge: Get
This is an apparent exception but, by and large, you'll find that the exceptions here will be Germanic words and the Germanic languages didn't go through that softening of Cs and Gs before Es and Is. The change was a purely a physical thing and didn't care that one word in a pair like magus/magi* underwent the shift and the other didn't. It's a matter of what the mouth was doing in the shift from the consonant to the vowel. In cases where the shift, for whatever reason, didn't happen (a word was coined after the shift had happened, for example) there will normally be some spelling convention to retain the hard sound as necessary, e.g. Italian spaghetti*.
* The things Ænigma will come up with. It wants spaghetti to be Spahn and magus/magi to be Maharashtra
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It wants spaghetti to be Spahn and magus/magi to be Maharashtra
Ah yes... i know that piece.... "Thus Spake Maharashtra". Excellent horn intro.
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