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Latin: Alumni vs. Alumnus | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6714 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 13 02 September 2010 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In an effort to entice me to join for another year, the alumni association of my former university sent me a bumper sticker to place on my car with the school logo. Underneath the logo are the words "PROUD ALUMNI". Shouldn't this be "PROUD ALUMNUS"?
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6234 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 13 02 September 2010 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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They clearly expect you to be so proud that there are always at least two alumni in your car, at least one of whom is male.
That, or they expect you to be proud of being ignorant of Latin. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6454 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 3 of 13 10 September 2010 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't really know Latin, but I do know that "alumni" is plural, "alumnus" is male and "alumna" is female.
Perhaps it's just too much trouble to put out "alumnus" bumper stickers for male former students and "alumna" bumper stickers for female former students. What happens if you have a married couple who attended the university and use the same car? Do they get a special "alumni" sticker? It is even more irritating to hear singular people say "I am an alumni." No, no, no! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zyz Newbie United States Joined 5131 days ago 19 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit | Message 4 of 13 11 September 2010 at 5:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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The words, having entered English, are English words, and we shouldn't be terribly
concerned about maintaining Latinate forms. It seems ill-advised to start producing statements like "I just met an alumnum of UV." But having said that, something else to the same effect: in American English, alumni is pronounced /əˈlʌmnaɪ/, and alumnae /əˈlʌmniː/. In Latin, the pronunciation of the final vowels are the other way around. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6267 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 5 of 13 24 September 2010 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
But other English words imported from masculine second-declension Latin follow the same rule: -us for singular, -i for plural. (Or, sometimes, -us for singular and -uses for plural.) Using -i for both singular and plural makes for a rather bizarre exception. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6377 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 13 24 September 2010 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, it's not like it's the first word to have its singular formed from a Latin plural. "Media" and "data" are, despite the cries of hypercorrective grammar nazis, singular nouns in English, formed from plural nouns of Latin. There are also heaps of nouns of Latin origin that don't form Latinate plurals, such as "medium/mediums", "circus/circuses" and the male and female genitalia ("Penes"? "Vaginae"?). So it wouldn't be that exceptional an exception. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6267 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 7 of 13 27 September 2010 at 6:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Those are uncountable nouns, though. You can say "one medium, two media", but you can't say "one media, two medias". I can't think of an example that became a countable noun. (One might say "opera", from Latin "opus" -- except Latin also has "opera" as a singular first-declension noun in its own right.)
While that's true, that doesn't matter, really. It just means that there are alternative rules, but they are rules nonetheless: sing. -a, pl. -ae sing. -a, pl. -as sing. -us, pl. -i sing. -us, pl. -uses sing. -um, pl. -a sing. -um, pl. -ums (For the sake of this discussion I'll overlook nouns outside the first and second declensions, since they're not relevant right now) "Alumni" as a singular just does not fit in there anywhere. So yes, I do think it is "that exceptional an exception". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| H.Computatralis Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6099 days ago 130 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Polish*, French, English Studies: German, Spanish, Latin | Message 8 of 13 03 October 2010 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm always quite amazed when people try to stop language change. Well, whether you like it or not language changes all the time. New words enter the language while old ones are abandoned, words change their meaning, usages are regularized, etc. Arbitrarily imposing some rules taken from another language is not going to stop that, sorry.
In this case, I think singular "alumni" is still a minority usage, but IMO it seems to become more and more acceptable. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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