Hugo Mills wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 08:19:42PM +0100, Stephen Davies wrote:
>
>> /. has a posting about how Linux can be infected with virii when using Wine.
>>
>
> Virii... if it was Latin, that would be the plural of "virius" (not
> a Latin word, to the best of my knowledge). If you were to follow a
> naive pluralisation, assuming that it's a second-declension noun, then
> you would get "viri".
>
> However, from a classisict's point of view, "virus" is a (rarely-
> encountered) word meaning "toxic fluid". No plural has been seen in
> the historical record, and it's not clear what plural it should take,
> if any -- in its few occurrences in historical texts, it's a mass
> noun.
>
> The English medical or technology term "virus" (an infectious
> particle or a form of malware, respectvely) has the perfectly ordinary
> Anglo-Saxon plural "viruses".
>
> Can we *please* put an end to the misguided "viri", the ignorant
> "virii", and the simply painful "virri"?
I wondered how long it'd take for your response to arrive Hugo!
Anyway, wikipedia agrees with you so it /must/ be true!
:-P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in_-us#Virus
Sean
--
www.funkygibbins.me.uk
