The correct octopus plural

The whole octopuses/octopi/octopoda/octopodes issue is hilariously tragic.
There is no black and white solution as three languages are involved.

Octopus is from the taxonomic Neolatin word octopūs and zoologically all -pūs words are 3rd declension Latin and generally masculine (genitive -podis and  plural nominative -podes), because they decided so. The Romans called octopuses polypus, a masculine second declension word (plural polypi), where the pus root is the same. In other words, English pedants would have told the Romans off for not getting their Greek right —ironic given that they are fluent at it as opposed to knowing less than a smattering of rules and words.

So if problem does not lies with the Romans, does it lie with the Greeks?

Maybe… Greek was continually changing and has different periods, the Greek in Greece now speak modern Greek, whereas under the Roman empire it was Koine Greek, before that a mix of dialects which waxing and waining prestige.

An archaic dialect was Doric were the word for foot was πός (pous, genitive που, pou, plural nominative ποί, poi), a second declension, whereas in others such Ionic, the early classic one of Homer, or Attic, the classic one from Athens, it was πούς (pous, genitive ποδος, podos, and plural nominative ποδες, podes). The Romans borrowed polypus from the Doric speakers, so their plural was polypi. A similar muddle happened with the Latin letters and transliterations from Greek.

So to recap in order of decreasing idiocy:

• Octopoda.
• Pro: Yes, octopus may be a masculine not neuter, but the order is called octopoda and Stephen Fry said so on QI.
• Contra: Octopoda is for consistency and Saint Stephen does make mistakes (he got his Greek wrong on The liar by writing patrochles)
• Octopi.
• Pro: Octopus was based on polypus and that zoologists have no right to decide and ruin the purity of Latin historical continuity.
• Contra: The word was coined by zoologists, the Roman's borrowed polypi right before they went out of style, anyway, and there is no such thing as continuity with Neolatin, just anachronism.
• Octopodes.
• Pro: The correct Neolatin plural.
• Contra: Rather hard to pronounce.
• Octopuses.
• Pro: it is not the end of the world.
• Contra. But it is fun.

It is curious how the word pedantry has the Latin pedes as a root…

Gender-less pronouns

Most folk agree that writing he/she is a pain, however, nobody agrees on what is the best substitute.
Singular they is the most commonly used and it appears in the king James's bible, so when Jehovah speaks English he/she uses singular they (ref). That last sentence shows that it has a glaring problem: singular they is used as a plural and the closeted prescriptivistic pedant (†)  in all of us screams out upon hearing a grammatical number mismatch (e.g. "Someone has made a mess again, I wish they'd tidy up once in a while"). "They is" is too revolutionary to be anything but jarringly awkward sounding.
Impersonal one (from the French homme curiously) is used differently, so is not a gender-less pronoun.


Wikipedia has a hodgepodge collection of attempted pronouns (link), some of them badly put together.
I thought I'd make up my own.


What did the vikings ever do for us? They gave us useful words!
They in English is not of Old English origin, but of Norse.
The third person personal pronouns in Old English are: (in the order subject, possessive, direct and indirect object)
M: he, his, hine (=him), him
F: heo or hie (=she. eo is read ee), hire (=her), heo or hie (=her), hire (=her)
N: hit (=it), his (=its), hit (=it), him (=it)
Pl: hie (=they), hira (=their), hie  (=them), him or heom (=them)


As you can see, not only some forms are repeated within a gender as in in English (her can be possessive or object), but also between (him can mean to it or to him). Therefore the Norse they makes life so much less confusing. 
Humorously, hie could be they or she, which would make gender-neutral pronoun advocates happy.


Search the Old English 3rd prs. plural pronouns gives me:
hie became hi or hy, which was last used in 1400.
hera gave us her.
heom became hem and then 'em.

So one version of a gender-neutral pronoun could be:
hy, her or heer (modernised hiera), hem or heem (modernised  heom).
Hy sounds a lot like I, though.

Alternatively, Old Norse could be the source of the sought pronouns.
The thon pronoun set which someone proposed is not based on the singular form in Norse as only the neuter begins with þ (thorn, th-group) and it is the same as the demonstrative pronoun that.
The feminine set is: hon, hennar, hana, henni
They have no derivatives in the OED, so hon, hennar and henne could be another set, but they do not sound English.
Those Old Norse pronouns became hon, hennes and henne in Swedish, which has a made up gender-neutral pronoun, hen, which would not work in English for obvious reasons.


Taking a step back, I think I'll adopt hon, heer and heem.
Example: Someone e-mail: hon said to call heem or heer secretary.
Maybe I'll stick with he/she.


†) Prescriptivism may suffocate the natural evolution of a language and has the sole purpose of linguistic snootiness, Descriptivism is a tad hypocritical to say the least. Descriptivistic snootiness at prescriptivistic snootiness at grammatic butchery...

Time traveler's grammar

Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the biggest problem with time travel was the grammar. He was right.

However, the solution presented in that superb book is obviously a joke as it takes the matter to its utmost complication. In reality, more straightforward —or, more correctly, loopforward— less awkward and grammatically sensible solutions exist, albeit not as funny and a bit too academically dry…

So. There are two grammatically paradoxical scenarios:

• The traveller will do an action in the past.
• The traveller has done an action in the future.

These two sentence show that the whole time travel grammar business is not really that much of a problem. After all, when letters are written the tenses used refer to those of the writer and not of the future reader, e.g. "by the time you will read this, I will have fled to Antarctica to join a nunnery" and not "as you read this now, I have already fled to Antarctica". Grumble grumble.

In essence, adding in the past or in the future, which act as temporal delimitators actually make the sentence sound. Curiously, the words past, present and future are actually fossils of Latin participles, namely past is from passatus, the past participle of passare (to pass), present is from præsens, the present participle of præesse (to preside), while future is from futurus, the future participle of esse (to be). This means that the two time-travel examples do have a slight (hidden) verbal muddle —and verbal muddle is what I want.

But can the muddledom be increased without breaking regular grammatical structure?

Germanic languages ‚a family which includes English, have no dedicated future tense. To wit, a word ending to make the tense (cf. "I will receive" with "je recevrai"). This gives us "the traveller will did/had done an action" or simply "the traveller will done an action", which possess the time travelling awkwardness I am after all.

Although it is a bit of silly as the construct formed by a modal verb plus past participle, simple past or past perfect is wrong. This is unavoidable as will plus present perfect is a future perfect ("the traveller will have done an action").

A further loophole is with would. Will is a modal verb that has a present indicative form (will) and a præterite (=past) subjunctive (would) and in Old English willan was a bog-standard verb (meaning to will/intend). Therefore, "the traveller would/willed do an action" should fit the bill of an action to be done in the past, but it just sounds like a conditional clause.

An alternative would be to introduce a present perfect of will: "the travelled has would/willed do/done/doing an action", which is relatively nicer.

After all that work, there is the problem that the two forms could work either way round.

• the traveller will had done an action
• the travelled has would do an action

Okay, the will verb was a good jail-breaker, what happens if it was not used and the time travelling grammar was to be tried on a Romance language?

In that case participles might do the trick, albeit badly. There are three issues, though, that make it a mess.

Firstly, the present participle (e.g. "the eating dog") is active and progressive while the past (e.g. "the eaten dog") is passive and perfect, but the inverse constructs could be made ("the has-eaten dog" and "the being eaten dog"). Parenthetically, Greek grammar has a much better fix, but Greek grammar has little to do with English, so it will have to do.

Secondly, Latin (and Greek) had a future participle but French and English do not, so it needs to be introduced. The Latin (first conjugation) suffix for the future participle is -aturus, which could be anglicised to -ature (/-eɪtʃər/ like nature) —okay, the -at- part is the same as -ed, but that is hair-splitting. So "the dog that will have eaten" could be "eatature (or eatenure) dog".

Lastly, decoupling tense of the participle from the verb and coupling the verb-y bit with the time-frame of the traveller and the participle with the time-frame of the action would allow:

• The traveller will (had) done an anction (action done in the past that the traveller will do).
• The traveller had doature an action (action doature that has not yet occurred that the traveller has done)

The latter is hideously horrible and doature sounds like douche. Which I think means that time travelling is for douchebags as is writing drivel about its grammar. I am a double douchebag and will stop here.