Prospectus - plural

[Esmee]

A friend of mine who is an English student just told me she had sent off for lots of 'prospecti'.

It's prospectuses, no? It made me snort, haha.

The English plural you give is fine. If she was trying to show off by using the Latin plural then she got it wrong, because unlike most Latin nouns ending in -us, prospectus is 4th declension so the plural is prospectus.

In summary:
prospectuses - good
prospectus - ok but pretentious
prospecti - bad

What knowledge you have, Fink! I'm impressed!

With a DD approaching secondary school, I am dreaming up even more pretentious sentences involving the genitive or ablative (-uum or -ibus). Enough to get me straight into the admissions' office bin...

Fink, is that also applicable for stadiums etc?

Syllabuses?

Syllabi?

I was going to pontificate about the difference between 2nd and 4th declensions, but I got here too late ....

Stadium being 2nd declension, the plural is stadia. I hope. 30 years is a loooong time.

ASmall - I bow to your superior Latin knowledge (nearly 30 year old O level here!) but surely the plural is stadiums given that the word is fully assimilated into English. It's just poncey to talk about stadia.

Why do latinate words have to get pluralised according to their origin and not other imported words?

Do you think so, Singsinthebath? Perhaps I have been swayed by listening to the utterly poncetastic sports reports, but I could swear that that arbiter of usage the BBC, for example, uses stadia. Perhaps some memoranda have been written on this very topic.

I was under the impression, Sings, that all words which had be assimilated into English could be pluralised as standard English words (hence I said that 'prospectuses' is right), but that there is also the option to use the original plural and this is often preferred for reasons of ponciness accuracy. I could be wrong. So kibbutzim rather than kibbutzes etc.

Sadly, Tethers, the 4th declension is not very common, particularly in imported words, so I can't actually think of another example that follows the 'prospectus' rule. In most Latin -us words, Esmee's friend would have been right with -i. If you want to go down the super-showy route, my favourite is 'octopodes' (from Greek). The taking-things-to-a-ridiculous-level route would lead to 'I take the omnem number 48 to work'; I say this only to show that such there is a limit, even for a hyper-pedant such as me who insists on a ham and cheese panino!

LOVE this thread

There was another thread on a similar topic a while ago, which got pretty heated. FWIW, I'm a classicist and I always use anglicised plurals (in the same way that I would always order two pizzas rather than two pizze). In my experience, people who insist on stadia etc are often those who are possessed of only a small amount of knowledge and wish to show it off .

Panino/i is a funny one, though. It's somehow new enough that it is still a properly foreign word and therefore demands to be treated correctly, but I imagine there will come a tipping point where 'panini' becomes acceptable as an anglicised singular. Tricky one.

Stadium - stadia
Memorandum - memoranda
Criterion - criteria
Datum - data

How many times are the final two always found in the plural form where the singular is required?