Nancy Friedman has an amusing post in her blog about the much-discussed, much-hesitated-over plural of the Toyota
Prius. Priuses? Prii? As she quotes one guy in her post, perhaps even the apparently grammatically
correct (in Latin) Priora?
These kinds of discussions can be fun, but they have a certain angels-on-pins quality to them. The plural of
Prius is not Prii. No. The default, natural plural is Priuses.
Why? Because adding -(e)s to nouns is how we form the plural in English.
This gives me cause to state my manifesto about words from other languages, which is this: once a word has accepted
an invitation into English, it plays by English rules. It does not get to bring along its native inflections and
conjugations and irregular declensions. Stated another way, English speakers who have a shiny new word to play with
are not expected to also know the morphological rules of the language which has so kindly sent us a word. We do not
have to know noun declensions in Latin, or how plurals are formed in Greek, or how verbs work in French in order to
take up words from those languages. You don't need to know those languages to speak English.
If you find yourself wavering on this question, consider the plural in English of the following words:
- Blitzkrieg
- bratwurst
- corgi
- corpus
- dachshund
- debutante
- emir
- falafel
- jar
- hamburger
- Kindergarten
- maven
- octopus
- opera
- opus
- phobia
- piroshki
- rickshaw
- schmuck
- telephone
- tsunami
- tycoon
- Weltschmerz
- yen
Now, if you believe that the plural of Prius is Prii, you're going to need to tell me the plural of
the words in that list, which are originally and variously from Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew,
Japanese, Latin, Russian, Welsh, and Yiddish. (For the curious, the German plurals are
Bratwürste, Kindergärten,
Weltschmerzen, Dachshunde, and Blitzkriege. And as a point of interest
Hamburger is an adjective in German; it's not even a noun. I won't mess with the other languages
because—to reiterate my point—I don't know those languages, so why should I know the native verbal judo
for those nouns?) If you're a stickler for Prii (or Priora), I sure hope you got all those plurals
right.
For that matter, what's the plural of ox? Ha, got you, I bet ... you had to stop and think about it, didn't
you? Historically, etymologically, it's oxen, using a plural form that's archaic and moribund (see also:
children, and for that matter Weltschmerzen). If you don't happen to work with oxen all
day, as you might not, you probably have so little cause to use the term that you might even revert to modern-day
English practice and call it oxes. And as far as I'm concerned, that's perfectly fine, because why should
you, after all, have to know the morphological rules of Anglo-Saxon, which has been dead for 700 years ...