BREAKING NEWS: TSR INSTALLS SPYWARE!
Marhis:
Quote from: jordi on 2009 July 21, 18:43:02
The word does come from Latin, but does not have a recorded plural form. If it had one, it would be *vira, as virus is a neuter word. It would never be viri, that's the plural second declension of the masc. noun 'vir', man.
And *virii is complete nonsense.
Correct, and I'll add more: virus (poison, in Latin) is a noun of the second declension (like vir), but it's a special case, as it retains the -us ending in subject, accusative and vocative case. It also doesn't have an own form for the other three cases, and it uses the synonym venenum instead. So there's no "viri", nor "viro", but the full (singular) correct declension is: virus, veneni, veneno, virus, virus, veneno.
Also (again), a plural form doesn't exist at all - virus is a singularia tantum (single only) noun.
In short, in Latin (and Italian) is indeclinable; in Italian we use the singular form (virus) with the plural article (i), but I assume that in English it's different, also because there's no different singular or plural article.
Zazazu:
I love that ya'll are getting all defensive about the validity of "viruses" while ignoring who said it was incorrect. Drakron. Drakron is ESL, and unlike many of the excellent ESL posters we have here, still suffers from awkward sentence structure and rampant grammatical errors. He has no leg on which to stand.
veilchen:
Mike, empty your inbox, would you please?
sewinglady:
Not that I'm very happy at the moment with TSR (I am not - their ads are full of redirects that take over your browser, etc.).
However, NOD32 from Eset scans that program as clean - no virus, no malware. I am running Eset's latest build with the latest update.
Not passing any judgment on the TSR program itself...but, apparently some anti-virus programs are more prone to giving 'false positive' readings.
Doc Doofus:
I have to leap to the defense of the word virii, not because it is correct or even appropriate, but because it is just cool, the way "fambly" is cool, i.e., a nonsense corruption of an otherwise decent word made for the sheer pleasure of indulging in corruption.
Likewise, I defend to the death the word penii as the plural of penis. Yes, I know, penis doesn't end with a -us, but let's not be picayune. Penii has many uses, for instance, in describing mutant genitalia. "And so it came to pass that their baby was born one dark, stormy night, bearing ten itty-bitty fingers, ten perfect itty-bitty toes, each like polished pink pearls, and two clear and unmistakeable penii, one pointing left, one right, like a bi-plane propeller."
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page