LATIN ENDINGS HOW TO

Media, plural of medium, is a label for the various modes of mass communication-newspaper, radio, television, electronic-and has been edging towards becoming a singular mass noun.

Agenda is the plural of Latin agendum вЂњthat which is to be doneвЂќ, but is established as a singular noun in English. To that list we can add the Latin names of plants, which generally take regularized plurals: antirrhinum/ antirrhinums, chrysanthemum/ chrysanthemums, delphinium/ delphiniums, laburnum/ laburnums, nasturtium/ nasturtiums.ДЄ few Latin plurals in this group have taken on an independent life of their own. But it wasnвЂ™t until the 1980s that вЂњstadiumsвЂќ became the preferred option for stadium/ stadia:ДЄnd some Latin plurals have just never been that popular, like mausoleum/ mausolea, for which вЂњmausoleumsвЂќ has been the more popular choice for a couple of centuries:ДЇinally, there are words for which the Latin plural form is essentially never used: album/ albums, asylum/ asylums, lyceum/ lyceums, museum/ museums, premium/ premiums. In the Google corpus forum/ fora lost out to вЂњforumsвЂќ back around 1930. Some Latin plurals have fairly recently lost the battle against regularization. Some are in a protracted neck-and-neck tussle between the Latin and regularized plural, likes solarium/ solaria and gymnasium/ gymnasia: Some, like curriculum/ curricula, rostrum/ rostra and crematorium/ crematoria have a fairly fixed dominant relationship with a minority regularized plural ending in -s, as in this example from the Google Ngram corpus: Several others fall into this category, among which are: corrigendum/ corrigenda, ovum/ ova, phylum/ phyla, stratum/ strata, spectrum/ spectra, serum/ sera, simulacrum/ simulacra, erratum/ errata, quantum/ quanta. And desiderata is the plural of desideratum, вЂњdesirable thingвЂќ.Дesideratum/ desiderata is a pairing that still feels Latin, and thereвЂ™s little tendency to regularize to вЂњdesideratumsвЂќ. In Latin, these words are second declension neuter, and they take -a as their plural ending.

IвЂ™ve previously written about the plurals of words ending in -us and -a, so this time itвЂ™s the turn of -um. It ushers in the long-delayed final post in my trio about Latin plurals. So prevalent was this version on the walls of student flats when I was at university, I was later rather surprised to discover it was of more recent pedigree, with an actual named author. The text has a rather complicated history of publication, and for a while in the вЂ™60s and вЂ™70s was distributed in ornate little A4 posters, like the one above, but marked вЂњFound in Old Saint PaulвЂ™s Church, Baltimore 1692вЂќ. Those are the opening lines of Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann, originally written in 1927. These suffixes are called the 'endings' because they indicate the person and the number of the conjugated form of the verb.Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,ДЄnd remember what peace there may be in silence. The common feature of the verb 'to see' in Latin is the stem 'vide-' and to show changes in person and number, Latin adds a suffix. Latin conjugates its verbs by attaching endings to the root of the verb itself. He, she, it, sees they see Here is the Latin translation for the verb English verb 'to see' with these modifications. Here is the conjugation of the verb 'to see' in the present tense in English.

You must learn two things for Latin verbs: (1) the stems, and (2) how the stems are modified at the ends to show different conditions under which the action is occurring.

LATIN ENDINGS HOW TO

For the most part, Latin verbs conjugate by attaching endings to the stems themselves, without all the separate helping words put in front of the stem as in English to tell you how to understand the action. Latin verbs have different rules governing the way they conjugate.